AI helps drive record $11.8 billion in Black Friday online spending People line up outside of a store during Black Friday in Woodbury, New York, on Friday. Although some shoppers queued up, many others used AI-powered shopping tools to help drive a surge in online spending on Black Friday. AI-powered shopping tools helped drive a surge in U.S. online spending on Black Friday, as shoppers bypassed crowded stores and turned to chatbots to compare prices and secure discounts amid concerns about tariff-driven price hikes. U.S. shoppers spent a record $11.8 billion online, up 9.1% from 2024 on the year's biggest shopping day, according to Adobe Analytics, which tracks 1 trillion visits that shoppers make to online retail websites. The holiday shopping season arrives amid tighter budgets, unemployment nearing a four-year high, U.S. consumer confidence sagging to a seven-month low and price tags that have shoppers watching every dollar. In a time of both misinformation and too much information, quality journalism is more crucial than ever.

NEW YORK – It would have been easy to turn on their computers at home over plates of leftover turkey and take advantage of the Black Friday deals most retailers now offer online. But across the country, thousands of shoppers flocked to stores on Thanksgiving or woke up before dawn the next day to take part in this most famous ritual of American consumerism. Shoppers spent their holiday lined up outside the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota, by 4 p.m. Thursday, and the crowd had swelled to 3,000 people by the time doors opened at 5 a.m. In Ohio, a group of women was so determined, they booked a hotel room Thursday night to be closer to the stores. In New York City, one woman went straight from a dance club to a department store in the middle of the night.