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Bank of Montreal chief economist Doug Porter sees diminishing value in analysing the post-Thanksgiving retail blitz as a measure of the state of the economy.
“With Black Friday upon us, analysts are engaged in the annual ritual of attempting to gauge the overall health of the economy from this [past] weekend’s sales tallies. How quaint. “There are at least a couple [of] reasons to downplay these particular results. First, we will again stress the point that consumers are still rotating from goods to services, especially in Canada. The shock would be if spending on goods wasn’t soft in inflation adjusted terms after a couple of blow-out years.
“Second, the nature of Black Friday has clearly morphed in recent years. I’ve rarely been accused of being an active shopper , so this is mostly hearsay, but many retailers have jumped the gun with pre-sales in the week, or even the month, ahead of the event – thereby diluting the punch. So, even a drop in sales volumes year-on-year won’t thwart the above theme of a resilient consumer.”
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