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Black Friday Winners And Losers: How Amazon, Walmart, Apple And More Fared

This article is more than 8 years old.

Black Friday brawls over discounted goods are by now a common occurrence. Image: YouTube.

With the Black Friday weekend now behind us, analysts and market researchers are crunching numbers to determine how many billions Americans spent on the annual sales bonanza. (It's an inexact science, as The Atlantic noted.)

Consumer insights firm ShopperTrak, for one, is estimating that shoppers spent over $1 billion less in brick-and-mortar stores on Black Friday this year than in 2014, thanks to the growth of e-commerce and to retailers "successfully elongating the holiday."

What is becoming clear is that some retailers and brands fared far better than others on the biggest shopping day of the year, based on both data and customer sentiment.

WINNERS:

Apple

Apple's iPad Air 2 and iPad Mini were among the top-selling gadgets of the weekend, according to software firm Adobe's data. What's more, the Cupertino, Calif. brand outsourced its Black Friday marketing efforts to Target , Best Buy , et al. (On Thanksgiving Day at the former, an iPad was sold every second on average, according to a Target press release.)

Not only are shoppers buying Apple products, but they're using them to make purchases, which should interest a company that's been trying to push its Apple Pay digital wallet for over a year. Of the estimated $905 million in purchases via mobile devices this Black Friday, about 75% were made on iOS using iPhones and iPads, according to Adobe.

Amazon

The e-commerce giant watched its Amazon Fire 7" tablet fly out the door all holiday weekend -- so much so, says receipts data firm InfoScout, that it was the top seller by units not only on Amazon.com but at Best Buy. The item is now on back order through mid-December.

The Seattle-based e-tailer also won the day in terms of internet buzz, generating more social media chatter than Target and Walmart combined, according to Adobe.

J.C. Penney

The mall stalwart started off on the right foot in terms of attracting shoppers, offering the biggest average savings of any mainstream retailer: 68% off, versus 56% and 50.1% respectively at competitors Macy's and Kmart.

The store chain was also among the earliest to open, starting its sale at 3pm on Thanksgiving Day. Its extended hours seemed to have little bearing on the lines forming across the country, as documented on social media.

From Thanksgiving afternoon in central Alabama, to early that evening in Mississippi through to Black Friday in Los Angeles and Muncie, Indiana, J.C. Penney attracted deal-seekers in their droves, forming queues that snaked around buildings and blocks.

Crucially, many tweets and their counterpart Facebook posts documenting these lines were followed by verdicts that the wait was worth it for steals like $4.99 towels, $9.99 sweaters, and the department store's famous doorbuster giveaway, collectible Disney snowglobes.

Forbes' retail oracle Walter Loeb has long said that 2015 would be J.C. Penney's year. New CEO Marvin Ellison should be receiving kudos for the once-floundering store chain's holiday weekend.

LOSERS:

Neiman Marcus

The high-end department store chain suffered a Black Friday nightmare: its website went down at around 8am EST, according to performance monitors Catchpoint Systems. Shoppers looking to scoop up deals on pricey apparel were greeted with an error message. When the site returned to normal on Saturday, Neiman tweeted that customers could snag an extra 33% off through that evening.

Walmart

There's no doubt Walmart made a killing this Black Friday weekend, having stocked up on traditionally popular doorbuster items like TVs to prevent a shortage. By the early morning hours of the shopping holiday, Walmart reported that it had already sold "enough movies to watch for close to 3,000 years."

But as one has come to expect, the big-box giant's Black Friday was marred by shopper brawls and, for the fourth year in a row, worker protests. This time around, as well as rallies outside stores, union-backed Making Change At Walmart conducted a food drive for workers to highlight their claim that the big-box store pays poverty wages. Outside Walmart billionaire heiress Alice Walton's Manhattan apartment on the morning of Black Friday, workers and allies who'd fasted for 15 days congregated with signs proclaiming: "Tell Walmart hunger is not a game."

In a statement on workers' Black Friday actions, the Bentonville, Ark. retail giant defended its wages, saying: "Our average full time hourly associate earns more than $13 an hour in addition to the opportunity for quarterly cash bonuses, matching 401k and healthcare benefits."

The Magnificent Mile

Chicago's most famous shopping street was all but shut down on Black Friday by Black Lives Matter activists and their allies. Their retail boycott was an extension of the #NotOneDime movement, now in it second year having been born in the aftermath of the murder of unarmed teen Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. Last year, protesters took part in die-ins at malls and popular shopping districts across the country.

This year, social justice advocates rallied against the murder of another young black man at the hands of police: Chicago's Laquan McDonald. Protesters blocked entrances to stores including Apple, Ralph Lauren , and Victoria's Secret. (Predictably, not all white shoppers handled this well.)

It is still unclear how much money this action cost these businesses on the biggest shopping day of the year. But if success can be measured in drawing attention to one's cause -- in this case, one that is a matter of life or death -- Black Lives Matter won the day, both on the streets and on social media.

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