Just how early has Black Friday been moved up and why?
CLEVELAND, Ohio - If you’re waiting for after Thanksgiving for Black Friday deals, you’ll be several weeks late.
Retailers already started “Black Friday” sales well before the traditional shopping day.
Walmart and Amazon started “Black Friday” deals a few weeks ago. Target, Best Buy, Macy’s, Old Navy and others aren’t waiting for Nov. 26. either. This is despite some stores closing Thanksgiving day.
What gives?
Rakesh Niraj, a marketing professor at Case Western Reserve University, said the tradition of rushing to shop on Black Friday is likely over — and marketing those deals and making them exciting is harder too.
“It’s definitely not associated in people’s mind that Black Friday would be in October,” he said
According to Fortune, Black Friday deals breached October for the first time in 2019, but deals continue to come earlier.
Niraj said the trend was accelerated by COVID-19, but it’s not new. More deals were going online, and retailers started opening earlier long before COVID.
Deb Gabor, CEO of the brand strategy consulting firm Sol Marketing, said the elongated Black Friday is exhausting for shoppers, and it isn’t good for stores either.
Especially when stores are pushing the “shop early” tagline on their websites.
“If the first thing I see is a big red banner with a warning about shipping delays, it doesn’t really give me the warm fuzzies I’m looking for as a consumer,”
Why? A race for the earliest sale.
Niraj’s explanation for the early deals is the prisoner’s dilemma. An economic theory that says if two or more parties — like stores — act in their own self-interest, it could ruin it for everyone.
If retailers are waiting till the day after Thanksgiving, the first one to open on Thanksgiving gets an advantage, Niraj said. “If one of them does it, then others have to follow suit,” Niraj said.
“If one person breaks the rank then all of sudden, more consumes are going there, and the other business are left behind,” Niraj said.
According to Fortune, part of the reason to do Black Friday early is to spread out the holiday season, since supply shortages make it difficult to condense shopping into a few key days during the season.
The pandemic is making it more pronounced, Niraj said, but when things return to normal, Black Friday will still be earlier than usual.
Online shopping grew during the pandemic and will likely keep growing, he said.
It used to be a tradition, he said, for families to scout out deals at big-box stores, make plans and divide and conquer on Black Friday morning. Now, people can shop multiple retailers from home.
That’s easier, but also less exciting. Niraj said stores will call them Black Friday deals because people know the name, but it’s really not about that day anymore.
Gabor said Black Friday used to be a time when shoppers were excited, feeling like they left with some sort of treasure.
Now retailers are trying to grab a bigger share of the shoppers, and their only idea seems to be earlier deals, Gabor said.
“I think because retailers don’t have anything up their sleeves,” Gabor said.
So how could Black Friday be less boring?
Gabor wrote the book on “Irrational Loyalty” (That’s the title). She said if retailers want customers to stick with them, even with prices are lower elsewhere, they need to create a relationship.
A way to do that is a 360-degree experience, as she calls it, where customers get more than a product.
She said a store that does this well is Sephora. Gabor said she walks in and there’s a mirror and vanity ready for her to use. What she wants to buy is accessible and easy to find, and the employees, armed with a holster full of makeup brushes, are ready to help her try out new products.
In other department stores, Gabor said product is locked away in a glass case, it’s hard to find employees and the lighting is akin to an interrogation room.
Gabor said BestBuy excels at another aspect, which is having staff that know the product and can help her get the most out of what she’s buying.
She said it isn’t impossible to make great experiences online. Brands have managed to make good videos and webpages that give her that feeling.
What doesn’t give her that feeling is when stores tell her to buy early, or it might be gone. She said “doom and gloom” messages isn’t what she’s looking for.
She thinks smaller stores are nimbler and can create these experiences easier.
“I think this is a fertile frontier for local and regional retail,” she said.
How will Black Friday shape out?
Niraj said lots of retailers make 30% to 40% of their sales in the last month and a half of the year, but, Black Friday is not the make-or-break day for stores that its sometimes believed to be.
The National Retail Federation, a nationwide industry group, is predicting the highest holiday retail sales on record.
The group’s prediction for holiday sales during November and December — $859 billion, up 8.5 percent from $843 billion in 2020, and the highest since at least 2002.