Black Friday and Beyond, Shopify's President, "Buy Now, Pay Later" Boost 11/27/23

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Carl Quintanilla (0:31)

Market moving insight and analysis. Join Jim Cramer, David Faber and me, Carl Quintanilla on the opening bell hour of CNBC Squawk on the Street.

Good Monday morning. Welcome to Squawk on the Street. I'm Carl Quintanilla with Jim Cramer, David Faber at Post 9 of the New York Stock Exchange. Future is a bit red as the S&P comes off four straight winning weeks, the longest stretch since early summer, a busy week with PCE Thursday, Powell on Friday, the market assesses Black Friday sales. Our roadmap begins with the retail record. Black Friday shoppers spending nearly $10 billion in US online, big gains year on year.

David Faber (1:02)

Plus signs of a strong start to the holiday shopping season are sending Shopify shares toward a 19-month high. Shopify's president is going to join us in just a few minutes. The bulls are back. Global stocks headed for what would be the best month in more than three, count them, three years.

Carl Quintanilla (1:21)

Let's begin with the holiday retail and the consumer. According to Adobe Analytics, Black Friday generated a record $9.8 billion in domestic online sales. That's up seven and a half year on year. Reports cite strong demand for electronics, smartwatches, televisions.

Meantime, MasterCard spending pulse has Black Friday sales up two and a half year on year. That excludes autos driven by jewelry and apparel. Got some buy now pay later metrics, Jim, out of Adobe as well.

Jim Cramer (1:46)

Yeah, I saw a firm ticking up. You know, Carl, what was supposed to happen this year was rates go higher, people spend less, Fed wins, soft landing.

David, the spending would indicate that there really can't be a soft landing, not with this kind of strength.

David Faber (2:05)

Yeah, I mean, I always have a hard time on this day in particular, making sense of some of the early data.

Although it does seem quite positive. Other than this one outlier, Morgan Stanley, where they seem to say their channel checks indicated that things were flat to down. But again, I don't know what channels they're checking.

And we are going with, I mean, at this point, you can obviously measure credit card and credit card spend is the way most people do, except the lowest end where they may be using more cash. But here's the Morgan Stanley research note, which kind of throws cold water on this idea. But Jim, you're right. It does appear that we've gotten off to a strong start. Today, of course, is Cyber Monday. We'll see how that fares. And everything gets lumped together at this point. We don't really talk about retail as in in-store versus out-of-store as much as we may have once done when we were measuring the growth of digital, which is now obviously enormous.

Jim Cramer (2:56)

Well, look, we had this Amazon game. Amazon paid, what, reportedly $100 million for that game. Did more people stay home and shop? I mean, that was kind of like a celebration of shopping.

I think that the game, obviously, New York, could be, I don't know, it's a bad game.

David Faber (3:14)

There are mostly bad games.

Yeah, they're, as I said, to my family, I'm now available every Sunday, the rest of the winter. So that's a good thing. I'm trying to put a positive spin on the fact that I do not need to watch the Jets, or the Giants for that matter. Well, the rest of the summer.

Jim Cramer (3:33)

The Giants don't even know how to tank. I mean, geez. But look, Carl, I'm watching the sales per minute coming from Shopify, which we have Harley on, and I just think that today is one of those days where make or break. I really think this is make or break, because it's Cyber Monday. Because, look, I think that when we, I didn't read a single brick and mortar piece that was positive.

I just didn't. I mean, I know jewelry did well. You know, geez, it's not enough.

We haven't had a lot of, other than A&F, we haven't had a lot of blowout.

Carl Quintanilla (4:09)

You liked Gap.

Jim Cramer (4:10)

Well, Gap was so bad. I mean, it was like, how could you miss? The old Navy was up 1% and that was enough to make people feel great.