For decades, Black Friday has been the Super Bowl of shopping. It’s the day after Thanksgiving when people camp outside retail stores to score early-morning doorbusters and aim to get all of their holiday shopping done at once.
For many retailers, being customers’ first store on Black Friday became crucial during the Great Recession, and competition grew fierce. Discounts became steeper, and Black Friday began spilling into the weekend and creeping into Thanksgiving.
Today, Black Friday isn’t just on Friday anymore.
“My goodness, it’s really Black November it seems,” said Dennis Hoffman, an economist and director of the L. William Seidman Research Institute at Arizona State University’s W. P. Carey School of Business. “The sales start in earnest, it seemed to me, even before Halloween this year.”
Some of the nation’s largest retailers such as Target, Walmart and Amazon are driving the ‘Black November’ trend by offering variations of pre-Black Friday deals for the past month.
Kmart poked fun at the trend in its TV commercial promoting its holiday layaway program back in September.
“Now’s the time to go to Kmart and put those gifts on layaway,” the ad states. “And then pick them up just in time for the big, non-Christmas celebration. Kmart no money down layaway. Merry birthday everyone.”
Retailers understand that waiting in long lines in the cold winter mornings and being shoved around by frenzied bargain hunters isn’t for everyone. So by offering deals on additional days, they’re hoping to reach more consumers and boost sales.
But it’s debatable as to whether that’s been successful.
Last year, Thanksgiving Day sales grew by $1.8 billion, but Black Friday sales dropped by almost the same amount. Also, overall spending on Thanksgiving weekend through Sunday grew by only 1 percent.
Those numbers essentially show that instead of spending more, consumers are spreading out their spending. With sales and deals now staggered, the Black Friday-urgency has tempered.
“Retailers themselves won’t admit whether Thanksgiving has been a profitable venture for them or not,” local retail expert Jeff Green said. “The fact that they won’t admit it means that it must not be.”
He said it’s getting problematic because while sales are mediocre, retailers’ costs are going up because of longer store hours and overtime pay for employees.
On top of that, Green said people generally don’t do all their Black Friday spending at one store anymore. There are just too many options now, especially online.
So they leave after grabbing their doorbuster, which he said retailers already sell at a loss.
“That’s the whole idea behind a doorbuster is that you’re in, therefore you’ll cross-shop,” Green said. “You can see it happen in Best Buy all night long when people are coming in for the doorbuster and then they’ll just leave. They’ll just grab their TV and go.”
Despite this, this expanding Black Friday trend is here to stay because retailers will lose customers to their competitors if they don’t keep up.
"They've definitely shot themselves in the foot," Green said. "But again, they feel they’ve had no choice from a competitive perspective."
For that reason, experts anticipate that Black Friday will eventually be dethroned as the "biggest shopping day of the year" and the wealth will spread to Small Business Saturday, Cyber Monday, Super Saturday and, of course, Thanksgiving.
