Crowds top online deals as reason some holiday shoppers will skip stores

You’d think the online deals piling up in consumers’ inboxes and the convenience of ordering from their La-Z-Boys would be the biggest reasons some shoppers will avoid stores this holiday season, but you’d be wrong.

It’s the crowds.

Among shoppers who said they were unsure about or not expecting to shop in stores this holiday season, the most common reason was crowds, cited by 52% of respondents, followed by long checkout lines (33%). Then came e-commerce’s siren calls, with 26% citing better deals online and 21% citing—ah, there’s the doorbell now—the convenience of online shipping and delivery.

The findings come from a new survey by Sogolytics, a customer and employee feedback software company, of 951 US adults who’d shopped in a physical store within the preceding three months.

Retailers might be tempted to dust off that social-distancing custom from the height of the Covid-19 pandemic of requiring customers to wait in line to enter when stores are crowded. Probably not a winning strategy: Only 22% of respondents preferred that option, while 45% preferred getting in immediately and the rest were fine either way.

For some shoppers, the prospect of holiday crowds doesn’t keep them away from ye olde brick and mortar but rather induces them to shop earlier.

A 2025 National Retail Federation holiday shopping survey by Prosper Insights & Analytics found that 42% of shoppers planned to start their holiday shopping before November. Nearly 4 in 10 (38%) of those early shoppers said it was to avoid crowds.

It’s a paradox, of course, that some don’t want to go to stores because so many others want to go to stores, and it recalls what Yogi Berra once said about a restaurant.

“Nobody goes there anymore,” he said. “It’s too crowded.”