NEW YORK– The holiday shopping season is about to hit full speed with Black Friday, kicking off the post-Thanksgiving retail rush later this week.
The annual sales event no longer generates midnight crowds at the mall or door breakers chaos of the past decadeslargely due to the convenience of online shopping and the habits that have developed the COVID-19 pandemic.
In the hope of tempting dubious consumers, retailers have been working for weeks bombarding customers with advertisements and early offers. But whether they visit stores or click on countless emails promising huge savings, tens of millions of American shoppers are expected to spend money on Black Friday itself this year.
According to industry forecasts, 183.4 million people will shop in U.S. stores and online between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday. National Retail Federation and consumer research firm Prosper Insights & Analyses. Of that number, 131.7 million are expected to shop on Black Friday.
At the same time, increasingly earlier Black Friday-style promotions, as well as the growing power of other shopping events (hello Cyber Monday ), the holiday spending landscape continues to change.
Here’s what you need to know about the history of Black Friday and where things stand in 2024.
Black Friday falls on the Friday after Thanksgiving every year, or this year on November 29.
The term ‘Black Friday’ is several generations old, but was not always associated with the holiday retail frenzy that we know today. For example, the gold market crash of September 1869 was specifically referred to as Black Friday.
The use of the phrase in relationship for shopping the day after Thanksgivinghowever, can usually be traced back to Philadelphia in the mid-20th century – when police and other city personnel had to deal with large crowds gathering before the annual Army-Navy football game and had to take advantage of seasonal sales.
“That’s why bus and taxi drivers call today ‘Black Friday’. They think in terms of the headache it gives them,” a sales manager at a Gimbels department store told The Associated Press in 1975, as he watched a police officer try to control jaywalkers the day after Thanksgiving. Previous references date back to the 1950s and 1960s.
Jie Zhang, professor of marketing at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business, points to a 1951 mention of “Black Friday” in a New York-based trade publication — which noted that many workers simply felt sick that day reported. after Thanksgiving in hopes of a long holiday weekend.
Beginning in the 1980s, national retailers began claiming that Black Friday symbolized their move from red to black thanks to holiday demand. But with many retail companies now operating in the black at different times of the year, this interpretation should be taken with a pinch of salt, experts say.
In recent decades, Black Friday became infamous for the flood of people in crowded stores. Endless lines of shoppers camped out at midnight hoping to score big discounts.
But online shopping has made it possible to make most, if not all, of your holiday purchases without ever stepping into a store. And while foot traffic has rebounded in malls and other shopping areas since the pandemic began, e-commerce isn’t going away.
Sales figures in physical stores in November peaked more than twenty years ago. For example, in 2003, e-commerce represented only 1.7% of total retail sales in the fourth quarter. Commerce Department facts.
It’s not surprising that online sales are now a much larger share of the pie. During last year’s holiday season, e-commerce accounted for approx 17.1% of all unadjusted retail sales in the fourth quarter, Commerce Department data show. That’s from 12.7% seen at the end of 2019.
Aside from the rise of online shopping, some big-ticket items that used to bring in shoppers on Black Friday — like a new TV — are significantly cheaper than they were decades ago, notes Jay Zagorsky, a clinical associate professor at Boston University’s Questrom. Business school.
“There is less need to wait in line at midnight because the items normally associated with doorbuster sales are now much cheaper,” Zagorsky told The Associated Press by email. He pointed to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics showing that the average price for a TV has fallen 75% since 2014.
While many people will do the majority of their Black Friday shopping online, projections from the National Retail Federation and Prosper Insights indicate that a majority of Black Friday shoppers (65%) still plan to shop in stores this year to shop.
It’s no secret that Black Friday sales no longer last just 24 hours. Emails promising holiday deals are now arriving before Halloween.
“Black Friday is no longer the start of the holiday shopping season. It has become the crescendo of the holiday shopping season” during what now feels like “Black Friday month,” Zhang said. Some retailers have updated their official marketing to refer to ‘Black Friday week’.
Retailers trying to gain a competitive edge and manage shipping logistics explain the rush, Zhang says. Offering early holiday deals spreads out purchases, giving shippers more breathing room to fill orders. Zhang therefore does not expect that the five fewer days between Thanksgiving and Christmas will cause major tensions this year, because retailers would have taken that into account.
Linking pre-Thanksgiving sales to Black Friday is also a marketing technique because it’s a name consumers recognize and associate with big, limited-time bargains, Zhang said.
Multiple post-Thanksgiving sales events are keeping shoppers enticed after Black Friday, including Small Business Saturday and Cyber Monday, which the National Retail Federation’s online arm designated in 2005.
American consumers have spent a record $12.4 billion on it Cyber Monday in 2023and $15.7 million per minute during the peak sales hour of the day, according to Adobe Analytics. On Black Friday, they spent $9.8 billion online, according to Adobe Analytics.
There are still plenty of people who enjoy in-person shopping after Thanksgiving and the activity is unlikely to die out, Boston University’s Zagorsky said.
While the significance of Black Friday is “diminishing somewhat” over time, the shopping event is still “a way to connect with others,” he said. “This social aspect is important and will not go away, making Black Friday still an important day for retailers.”