5 minutes with Prosper Insights’ Philip Rist on the evolution of holiday shopping

The Motorola Razr V3 was the top-selling cell phone in 2004, the same year Philip Rist started conducting research on holiday shopping habits. Earlier this year, Adobe Analytics projected 53% of all online sales during the 2024 holiday season would be done on phones, a brisk about-face from the days of the flip phone Razr.

Rist — co-founder and EVP of strategy at Prosper Insights and Analytics — and his company partnered with the National Retail Federation to conduct a holiday shopping trends survey for 2024, revealing an intriguing tilt back toward in-store shopping. Rist spoke with The Current about how seasonal shopping has changed over the years, what to make of the latest findings and where retail is going next.

The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Can you sum up the changes you’ve seen within the holiday shopping season since you started doing research 20 years ago?

It’s so much about the adoption of online shopping, not only from the customer standpoint, but from the retailers themselves. Twenty years ago, Amazon was new.

And that brings up Cyber Monday. I know Ellen Davis, who actually coined the phrase Cyber Monday. At that point in 2005, consumers didn’t have broadband in their homes — a lot of them had dial-up. People would wait to go back to the office on Monday to use the computers at work because the company had good internet access.

This convergence of technology by people and then the deployment to where we are today is why you’re not seeing the same numbers for Cyber Monday as you did maybe 10 years ago.

Is Cyber Monday necessary anymore?

It still is because merchants know the consumers are expecting something. It’s no longer Cyber “Monday.” Now it’s a week.

As the pandemic happened, online shopping was already growing, consumers were adopting it and then the physical structures closed. Online shopping was the only way people could order toilet paper. That wasn’t something people thought about before the pandemic. So it pushed it over the edge.

And then post-pandemic, we start getting into inflation. Now you have the consumer saying, “I need to shop around, and I need to compare prices and brands,” and online shopping is a great way to do that.

But the pandemic also impacted people. And what we saw in this year’s data is people were ready to get out of the house.

Would you say there’s been a move back to stores?

It’s people wanting to be with other people.

There was a book written a long time ago called Megatrends by John Naisbitt. (The book was published in 1982.)

There was a chapter that introduced the concept of “high tech, high touch.” He said anytime technology is introduced into society, there will be groups of people that will want to do the opposite of that technology. Things like going back to listening to vinyl. This would be a continuation of that.

Humans are human. And as they’re faced with more technology, sometimes they’ll do things that are the opposite of the technology. Getting out and looking at the Christmas tree and hearing the songs and seeing children laughing, that’s all a part of that.

You mentioned inflation. Inflation has come down. It’s now below 3%, but the way people changed their habits seems to have stayed.

Politicians like to say that the inflation rate is down, but the prices have not gone back down. All they’re talking about is the rate of increases is lower.

Consumers have learned to try and maximize how they shop and experiment with new products and brands. This is why merchants the last couple of years have started their holiday promotions so much earlier.

Black Friday used to be when the deal started. Now Amazon had deal days back in October. Walmart had deals happening before Halloween. This was unheard of 10 years ago. They knew consumers were managing their budgets so they figured they could capture the dollars first before they ran out.

This is probably one of the biggest long-term changes for Black Friday weekend. It used to be that was the time when the deals happen. Now the whole month of November, folks were doing Black Friday all month.

That makes me wonder what Black Friday, Cyber Monday and the whole thing will look like going forward?

For the last couple years, rather than being the kickoff of the holiday season, it truly is halftime. That weekend is the halfway point between Halloween and Christmas Day.

Our statistics show — and this has been consistent for the last couple of years — by the end of Cyber Monday, 50% of the holiday shopping has already been done.