There are many surveys and predictions about the 2009 holiday shopping season and Black Friday 2009 in particular. One new survey that was published yesterday caught my eye because it was published by ICSC and Goldman Sachs.
ICSC is the International Council of Shopping Centers. The organization had Opinion Research Corporation conduct a survey of 1,000 randomly selected consumers between 10/29 and 11/01.
According to the survey's result 16% of consumers will start their holiday shopping on Black Friday. This is up 6% from the ICSC 2008 survey.

The average money consumers plan to spend on gifts is $543 and $133 on gift cards. Apparently there is a shift of money going into gifts and away from gift cards.
More details on the ICSC site. Via Reuters.

In our empirical analysis though, we can already see a dramatic increase in consumers buying gifts now compared to October and the first days in November of last year.
The reasons for this increase could be that consumers who know what they want can already get great deals today. For instance, Walmart announced yesterday In-Store Deals for Saturday that will most likely draw the first big wave of electronics shoppers to the mall. A $298 Windows 7 HP Notebook and a Xbox 360 Arcade with $100 Gift Card are already as good of a deal as you can expect for Black Friday.

More Black Friday 2009 Deals.