CHICAGO – The driest Thanksgiving weekend in five years may have helped holiday shopping, despite an overall decline in foot traffic. But some shoppers just took notes in the hopes of finding an even better deal online. That's a consequence of Amazon continuing to squeeze prices, exacerbating the "showrooming" practice of people getting ideas at brick-and-mortar stores, then buying online. Heather Just and husband Dominic of Rockford, Illinois, brought their twin 11-year-old boys and 13-year-old son to the giant Water Tower Place on Chicago's Magnificent Mile on Saturday to see "what their eyes get big about." The excursion was more recon mission than shopping spree. "We're watching, we're watching," she told her sons, who focused their attention on a Nintendo Switch portable game console.

Next to the M56, on the outskirts of Manchester, the future has landed. A cluster of huge distribution centres sits at the heart of Airport City, a new development part-funded by the Beijing Construction Engineering Group (two years ago, it was visited by president Xi Jinping of China). Among the biggest buildings is one of Amazon's self-styled "fulfilment centres". Known within the company as MAN1, it opened in September last year, but everything inside, from the chairs to the wall-mounted screens, looks as if it has just come out of a box. Deeper within the centre, beyond the reception area and meeting rooms, there is something else just as new: a great expanse of space behind a metal cage, where dozens of robots, finished in Amazon orange and each emblazoned with its own number, glide across the floor, gracefully avoiding collisions and sprinting to their next task. Amazon employees call them "drives", but to all intents and purposes these are droids, summoned from the dreams of science fiction and put to work. In some Amazon warehouses, workers – or, in the company's parlance, "associates" – still pace up and down huge aisles, picking out goods and preparing them for shipment; these shifts are said sometimes to involve hikes of 11 miles. The humans in charge of the process known as "picking" now remain in closed workstations, built around a screen that tells them what they need to get next, while the robots bring the shelves – reinvented as four-sided fabric towers, full of pouches that contain everything from DVDs to dolls – to them. There are tasks only a human can do, such as the careful packing of boxes.

A lot of people have been doing light therapy during the winter to keep their mood up while the Sun is hiding. There was even an episode of Broad City about it. Well, Llana could have used the Luminette 2 light therapy glasses, because they let you get some much-needed light while you're on the go instead of dashing into a room for light therapy every time your mood goes down. These are for the person who has issues with seasonal depression who doesn't have a lot of time. There are so many different headphone options out there that it's hard to know which ones to get, so we'll save you some time.

Macy's customers in stores across the country were in for a surprise while waiting in line to take their Black Friday hauls home. The credit card system at Macy's was reportedly down. Customers waiting in long lines in stores were tweeting that all non-Macy's cards were being declined by the system. The store had been advertising massive sales in the days leading up to Black Friday. The outage comes on one of the biggest shopping days of the year during which thousands of customers visit locations all across the country expecting great deals.

Displays for the echo dot and echo are seen inside the Amazon Books store in the Time Warner Center at Columbus Circle in New York City, New York, U.S., May 25, 2017. The smart speaker is the newest home consumer electronics product category. And this year, the technology is more advanced with features like built-in displays. Fox News spoke with DealNews, a comparison shopping website, for recommendations on the best deals for smart speakers, based on a voice-controlled intelligent personal assistant such as Amazon's Alexa. Here are five of the best deals for this holiday shopping season.

Case in point, the SKEYE Nano 2 FPV Drone is the world's smallest camera drone, but it boasts an unrivaled flying experience. With adjustable gyro sensitivity and 6-axis flight control system, this tiny drone is easy to control for even the most novice pilots, making it a perfect gift for the aspiring aviator on your list. Plus you can take an extra 20% off its sale price when you plug in the BFRIDAY20 coupon code at checkout, bringing the total to just $51.20, down from $99. Featuring Ready to Fly Technology, the SKEYE Nano 2 FPV Drone makes operation easy for beginner pilots. You can take off, land, and hover easily with built-in auto-functions, and it can capture real-time, first-person video with its HD, WiFi-controlled camera.

As Amazon gears up for Cyber Monday and the busy holiday shopping season, it's getting help from thousands of robots that search through millions of items to ensure the right item gets shipped to the right customer. Kara Tsuboi takes us inside an Amazon fulfillment center in Tracy, Calif., to watch the robots in action.

Amazon's Black Friday sale is shaping up to be quite something, with great deals available on the retail giant already. As the actual hour of sale draws nearer, even more deals would possibly be added. Aside from other brands, Amazon is also heavily promoting its own devices and services as part of the Black Friday sale. For instance, the Amazon Echo speakers go on sale starting from $39. One of the huge stumbling blocks in getting the best deals on Amazon on Black Friday is actually claiming the deal before it runs out.

Holiday shoppers can expect price cuts for numerous electronics, including smart TVs, smartphones and home assistants, for this year's Black Friday. Amazon, Target, Walmart, Best Buy, Samsung and Microsoft are all offering tech deals, with some offers starting before Black Friday and going on through Cyber Monday. Below are the best tech deals the retailers are offering. WALMART - Acer Aspire ES Laptop - $449, save $100. BEST BUY - Amazon - Echo (2nd generation) - $79.99, save $20. AMAZON - Fire 7 Kids Edition Tablets - save $50 when purchasing two (offer available now).

Artificial intelligence might just spawn a whole new style trend: call it "predictive fashion." In a paper published on the ArXiv, researchers from the University of California, San Diego, and Adobe have outlined a way for AI to not only learn a person's style but create computer-generated images of items that match that style. The system could let retailers create personalized pieces of clothing, or could even be used to help predict broader fashion trends. First, the researchers trained a convolutional neural network (CNN) to learn and classify a user's preferences for certain items, using purchase data scraped from Amazon in six categories: shoes, tops, and pants for both women and men. This type of recommender model is common in the online retail world, usually showing up in an "Other items you might like" area at the bottom of a page.