Black Friday in-store shopping up from 2020 but trails pre-pandemic levels

• Concerns over the supply chain also likely drove more people to shop in person, according to Sensormatic Solutions, a data analytics firm.

By the numbers: Black Friday foot traffic was up 48% over 2020, but still down 28% from 2019, according to a preliminary Sensormatic Solutions report.

• Total online spending on Black Friday was around $8.9 billion, which is at the low end of Adobe’s predicted range and slightly lower than 2020, when total spending hit $9 billion, per Adobe.
• In 2019, online spending on Black Friday reached $7.4 billion, per Adobe.

The big picture: This year marks the first time where both Thanksgiving Day and Black Friday "did not see an increase in online spending [year over year], another sign that consumers started to shift their spending to earlier in the season, responding to promotions and deals from retailers that started in October," Adobe said in a statement.

• Overall holiday sales are predicted to grow this year, according to the National Retail Federation.

• The National Retail Foundation predicted last month that holiday sales during November and December will grow between 8.5% and 10.5% over 2020, compared with an 8.2% growth during those same months in 2020.

What to watch: Adobe predicts that Cyber Monday will be the biggest online shopping day of 2021, with between $10.2 billion and $11.3 billion spent online.

Go deeper: Post-Thanksgiving shopping looks to make up for lost time

Axios' Hope King contributed reporting.

Editor’s note: This story has been corrected to state that the data on Black Friday foot traffic was according to Sensormatic Solutions, not Mastercard.