Paul Cohen Friday Quotations

Black Friday is like a national phenomenon, ... The nice thing this year is that there's a lot of mall store traffic very early and people are holding lots of bags. So they're not just window shopping. They're actually buying.

When all the numbers are counted, consumers could have given retailers an early holiday present, ... Last year Black Friday spending on our cards totaled $3.6 billion. We could cross $4 billion this year.

The numbers Visa has seen over the Friday and Saturday period are encouraging, but we will continue to watch over the next several weeks to see if the positive trends hold true, ... Based on the data Visa has seen to date, we remain cautiously optimistic that this will be a good holiday season for merchants.