TrafficCourt

We made it through Black Friday and the rest of the weekend. NRF’s early take is that up 0.5 percent. ShopperTrak’s numbers are extrapolated off the traffic counts the company conducts at malls.

Barry Ritholz looks at why the earliest numbers that get reported are a bit suspect. We’ll get more reliable figures tomorrow. That’s when ICSC and Goldman Sachs report the first weekly holiday same-store sales stats. Still, all the early numbers should be viewed with some skepticism and we really need to wait until the full season has passed and we started getting the monthly same-store sales numbers from retailers. We’ll get November numbers in early December. That will be the first really clear view of how the holiday shopping season is panning out.

As the stats come rolling in, the Wall Street Journal has a report that wonders if any of the holiday sales predictions matter. Most of the previews come out in September and October. Is that too soon for forecasts? The report also looks at the methodologies of the different prognosticators and wonder if any are accurate enough.

Here are some other news and notes from the last few days.

• An event with teen star Justin Bieber at Roosevelt Field Mall got a little bit out of control.
• The Mall of America conducted its first lockdown drill. It will conduct another round of drills after the New Year.
• An interesting story by Joel Kotkin looks at the proliferation of malls in India. In 2000, there were virtually no malls in India. Now there are several hundred and many more on the way. The story includes lots of interesting links and looks at mall development internationally. Similarly, a recent WSJ piece looks at the state of mall development in China.
• Lastly, there’s now a cool new Iphone app that features maps to more than 1,000 malls in the United States.