Given the popularity of black Friday in the Canadian retail landscape, we decided to analyze the traffic across all retail properties we serve to understand the similarities and differences with black Friday traffic from last year. We serve major shopping centers and retailers across the country. Our footprint provides a representative view of the Canadian in-store black Friday shopping trends.

Figure 1 presents the main findings of our study. Overall, across Canada, in-store black Friday traffic appears much stronger in 2016 than in 2015. In particular, across all properties we monitor, we experience and average increase of 8% in footfall traffic this year compared with last year. In the same figure we also display the average difference in dwell time (time spend in store) between 2016 and 2015. We can observe that the average dwell time decreased on average by 6% across all properties we monitor.

Black Friday Footfall Traffic and Dwell Time in Canada (2015 vs 2016)

Across the country, we also note that traffic increase was much stronger on the east coast compared with the west coast properties we monitor.
Based on these findings one may form hypothesis to attribute the result. It is possible that the choice of online commerce makes shoppers more strategic in their shopping patterns. In particular it appears that shoppers do not substitute in-store shopping for online; in contrast shopping traffic in physical stores is strong as the numbers suggest. However shoppers become more strategic in their shopping behavior, splitting purchases between online and in-store, and thus this may explain the drop in the dwell time.