“Most stores we contacted reported strong follow-through sales last week and have received ‘re-stocks’ following the initial launch,” says McKechnie. “We had guesstimated ~ 200k Verizon-only ‘sell in’ prior to the launch. We now expect at least another 200k by Black Friday and 150-200k through the remainder of the holiday season, which gets us to our 600k forecast for the quarter. All stores appear ‘well stocked’ with none reporting shortages….Our checks with stores indicate no issues with returns of the Droid.”

Evidently, Verizon’s Droid saturation campaign, with a budget estimated at $100 million, is paying off–despite its impersonal sci-fi positioning.

iLaunch day 2009 was one for the record books, as AT&T customers scrambled to get their hands on the fastest, most powerful iPhone yet.

Here’s a look at some of the milestones we achieved:

• Best-ever sales day in our retail stores
• Second-largest traffic day in our retail stores
• Most transactions processed via our IT systems in a single day
• Most upgrade eligibility checks in a single day
• Largest order day in att.com history
• Largest features sales day in att.com history

On this year’s launch day, iPhone sales exceeded sales recorded on 2008’s iPhone launch day, Black Friday 2008 and Dec. 26, 2008–all heavy-volume sales days. In fact, this year we surpassed 2008’s launch day sales at about noon Central time, and sustained our previous peak hour record, also set in 2008, for 11 straight hours.

[Image credit: Gizmodo]

Black Friday. Cyber Monday. Mobile Tuesday.

What’s next, Debt Consolidation Loan Wednesday? 401(k) Withdrawal Thursday? Pavlov’s Dog Friday?

Try Green Monday. Turns out, the Monday two weeks before Christmas is also a shopping holiday, one apparently held in celebration of the seasonal deadline for free shipping. “This is the last minute [to ship]” said eBay (EBAY) executive Jim Griffith. “It’s do or die.”

Although, given the current economic climate, it’s “do less.” Because according to Chase Paymentech’s Cyber Holiday Pulse Index, the average dollar amount of purchases made on Cyber Monday this year was down 12 percent from last year (click on the charts below). Though there are 14 percent more total transactions this year over last, the typical shopper spent $7.19 less per transaction. “Cyber Monday was very interesting,” said Aaron Press, Director of Market Analysis for Chase Paymentech. “Transaction volume was well ahead of last year for that day, but sales growth was meager. For the entire holiday season, the slower rise in sales volume compared to the steeper increase in transactions has resulted in the average ticket being lower on most days.”

Often touted as the biggest online shopping day of the year, Cyber Monday has never managed to live up to the expectations of the retail association that created it back in 2005. It ranked ninth among the heaviest online shopping days in 2007, and it’s clearly not going to do much better this year, given the prevailing economic climate. Sure, shoppers spent $534 million on Black Friday, up one percent from last year. But for the holiday season-to-date, they spent four percent less.

Said Global Hunter Securities analyst Richard Hastings, “We expect Cyber Monday to be relatively weak, since it’s very credit card sensitive. We’re hearing consistent reports of more use of cash and debit cards in stores. That could weigh on Cyber Monday.”