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- Black Friday’s power has been diminishing for years.
- Deals started earlier than every before this year, and will continue longer than in years past.
- In-store shopping has shrunk in the midst of a global pandemic.
- In 2020, the passage of time is meaningless and confounding. So, it makes sense that this year would put the nail in the coffin on the idea of Black Friday as a singular day of sales and frantic shopping.
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It’s Black Friday. But, doesn’t it feel like it has been Black Friday for a while? Or, as if it was never Black Friday at all?
The sales started more than a month ago, with Amazon’s delayed Prime Day. As of Wednesday, shoppers had spent $62.5 billion online, up 36.2% from last year, according to Adobe Analytics data. Every single day in November has seen more than $1 billion in online sales, with Adobe concluding that companies “successfully moved shoppers to buy earlier in the season with early discounts and effective promotions.”
The stretched-out start to the holiday shopping season resulted in people spending $5.1 billion online on Thanksgiving Day, up 21.5% from last year — a somewhat tempered outcome in a year of explosive online sales.
“While yesterday was a record-breaking Thanksgiving Day with over $5 billion spent online, it didn’t come with the kind of aggressive growth rate we’ve seen with the start of the pandemic,” Taylor Schreiner, director at Adobe Digital Insights, said in a statement. “Heavy discounts and aggressive promotions starting in early November succeeded at getting consumers to open their wallets earlier.”
“I don’t even know if I’d call it Black Friday anymore,” Boston Consulting Group’s head of retail, Nate Shenck, told Business Insider. In 2020, we are seeing “deals lasting longer, starting earlier,” Shenck said.
The pandemic and associated e-commerce boom is not entirely to blame. Increased year-round discounts and the rise of online sales have made Black Friday less important.
Back in 2017, Josh Elman, a consumer and retail analyst with Nasdaq Advisory Services, told Business Insider "the whole idea and concept of Black Friday deals in store will diminish over time." A few years later, it looks like he nailed it.
A decade ago, retailers were fighting a pitched Black Friday battle, offering better prices on a frantic day or two of shopping. Then, the retail apocalypse and malls' declining foot traffic forced retailers to start offering massive discounts during every month of the year. Rising e-commerce sales helped people realize that bargain shopping did not have to be a crowded, stressful experience you suffered through the day after Thanksgiving. Cyber Monday further took the spotlight off of Black Friday.
"It has become less of a physical event and more of a virtual event in the last five to six years," Dave Marcotte, a senior vice president at Kantar Retail, told Business Insider earlier this year, adding that Black Friday has lost its "immediacy."
The pandemic sent Black Friday stretching longer and longer, until no longer recognizable
In-store shopping is particularly sparse this year. Walmart, for example, is limiting the number of people allowed inside stores. And, even stores with less strict limitations are simply seeing more people shop online than in person.
"Newport Centre, a major mall in a major metro area is a ghost town. ... This feels more like an average Tuesday in April than #blackfriday2020," tweeted Fortune retail reporter Phil Wahba.
—Phil Wahba (@philwahba) November 27, 2020
Meanwhile, online sales are stretching longer. Cyber Monday has been rebranded as Cyber Week by companies like Walmart and Target. But, the actual length is even longer — something closer to a "Cyber Month."
This is all happening in a year where the passage of time is meaningless and confounding. Pumpkin spice latte season starting earlier than ever because people are miserable? Sure! People putting up Christmas lights before Halloween to battle 2020-induced depression? Bring it on!
As people shop online in an attempt to eke some joy out of a year in which every day can feel the same, it is no surprise people were happy to have "holiday" shopping start early.
Black Friday has been going on for weeks. Yet, if the "day" of sales can stretch for months, with little incentive to shop on the actual day, the traditional Black Friday is meaningless. Black Friday is dead; long live Black Friday.