No more waking up in the middle of the night to stand in lines for hours outside of your favorite store before stampeding in to search for the items you want. No more stores are getting completely cleared out the day after Thanksgiving with empty shelves of electronics and Christmas toys. Now, Black Friday sales run all week and Cyber Monday is gaining traction for people who don’t want to wait outside in the cold or be surrounded by tons of people. While some people may try to blame the pandemic for the lack of in-person Black Friday shopping, this trend started long before COVID-19.
According to Statista, in-store Black Friday shoppers had been dropping by about five percent year over year from 2015 to 2019. The drop from 2019 to 2020 was only two percent more than the projected drop from this trend. This is because it was no longer a secret that stores had Black Friday sales the whole week leading up to “the biggest shopping day of the year.” Since 2020, these sales have been more like month-long discounts leading up to holiday gift-giving. People are no longer eager to be pushed and shoved as their shopping becomes competitive. The stores and their holiday discounts have had to adapt to the convenience that we have come to expect from shopping.
With stores like Amazon and Walmart offering same-day delivery of more items than you can imagine and general discounts happening throughout the year, Black Friday is not as enticing as it used to be. We have seen Cyber Monday expand as well to Cyber Week in the case of some online retailers and this is just following the trend set by brick-and-mortar stores. It is important with inflation and general economic struggles for companies to do whatever they can to keep customers shopping. It has been proven that people are motivated by sales and the United States does a lot of shopping leading up to the winter holiday season, so even though Black Friday participant numbers are down, profit is still through the roof.
The American populace may consider themselves to be price-sensitive right now, but that did not stop hundreds of millions of them from spending over 10.5 billion dollars on Black Friday (the day itself) last year. Capital One’s Shopping Research finds that Cyber Monday overtook Black Friday sales by 20 percent with Amazon having almost 18 percent of the sales. Black Friday now serves more as a call to action to do the shopping that people were already planning on doing. It is a tradition long baked into families who shop together for holiday gifts after Thanksgiving dinner. The tradition is not going anywhere. If anything, it is getting bigger, longer and more impactful as Black Friday strives to become more and more convenient for consumers.