Never Going Back: Why Black Friday will never be the same
If you’re like me, and you were curious about how Black Friday hype translated into retail sales, your head is spinning right about now. Because the flurry of post-Black Friday news reports is packed with conflicting information, data that doesn’t seem to add up, and—perhaps unsurprisingly given those disparities—wildly variant conclusions about whether the Black Friday weekend was a “success” or a “disappointment” and about what is in store for the rest of the holiday season.
I honestly don’t think I have seen two articles that seem to be fully in sync with one another. Consider the following:
Reuters reports that brick-and-mortar sales on Thanksgiving and Black Friday were down 0.5% (according to ShopperTrak), and cites Adobe Systems in reporting that online sales were up a dramatic 25% from last year during that same time period.
An article on ICSC states that the National Retail Federation estimated that total retail sales (both brick and mortar and online) between Thanksgiving and Sunday were down 11% compared to the same timeframe in 2013.
The New York Times reports that IBM estimates that online sales numbers were up 14.3% on Thanksgiving Day and 9.5% on Black Friday.
I think all of this confusing and sometimes contradictory information is important—not necessarily because of what it tells us about Black Friday this year, but what it suggests about what we can expect out of Black Friday in the years ahead. Because while we might be getting some early mixed messages about what happened over the holiday weekend, the very fact that such disparate information is out there may be a telling indication that the whole Black Friday phenomenon is changing. In fact, I think we are headed toward a “new normal”, and 2014 might just be the tipping point.
What will that new normal look like? We’ve dispensed with any pretense of holiday shopping being a post-Thanksgiving event. In recent years, the season has started earlier and earlier, and the traditional doorbuster deals have started earlier, as well. Consider the fact that Walmart unveiled their doorbusters on November 1st this year, a full month before Black Friday. The boundaries of what constitutes Black Friday have evolved in recent years, with Friday morning openings changing to midnight sales, and then earlier evening openings, and finally (and in some cases controversially) stores that simply stay open all or most of Thanksgiving Day itself.
As the impact of Black Friday is being diluted and dispersed over several days, Cyber Monday has also lost some of its punch. With customers shopping online throughout the weekend and throughout the following week (“Cyber Week”), the motivation to make purchases on Monday is less urgent.
As an industry, we still look to Black Friday as if it means something. But is that meaning changing? Has it already changed? Do we need to stop thinking about it as a “day”, or even a weekend—but just as another piece of the holiday shopping puzzle? With all these shifting timelines and evolving practices, I have my doubts about what that piece can tell us about what lies in store for the rest of the yearly puzzle. Because while we like to draw conclusions about what Black Friday portends for the holiday shopping season to come, studies have shown that there is no reliable correlation between Black Friday sales and overall holiday numbers.
Going forward, Black Friday itself will likely look and feel a little different. I suspect that we will continue to see new schedules, with retailers realizing that staying open all night on Black Friday is a losing proposition. This year, Best Buy opened at 6:00 p.m. on Thanksgiving, closed at 1:00 a.m. and reopened at 6:00 a.m.—a schedule almost certainly designed to miss the late night lull. And with online sales continuing to increase at the expense of brick and mortar, the days of looking for a parking space on Black Friday might be over!
In terms of gauging the impact of Black Friday weekend, this year will likely become the norm: tough to measure and tougher still to draw definitive conclusions. For now, what we do know is limited, and meaningful conclusions will likely have to wait until the entire holiday season is over. I’ve touched on this before, but the real indicator isn’t so much the revenue as it is the profit—in which case we won’t even know in January, but weeks or even months later when retailers release more detailed financial data. One of the few things we can say about this year is that people definitely shopped earlier—earlier in the season and earlier in the holiday weekend. So perhaps those early promotions and doorbusters actually worked, after all (assuming the customer shopped for other merchandise during that same shopping trip). And while the numbers are still all over the place, the big-picture pattern is clear: brick and mortar is treading water at best, while online numbers (and especially mobile sales) are up dramatically. Of all the developments in the continuing evolution of Black Friday, I know I’m not alone in thinking that the rapidly expanding influence of online and mobile sales is the single biggest and most influential development of all.
I’d love to hear your thoughts and observations from the holiday weekend. Did you do your shopping from the comfort of home, or did you head out to the stores? What changes did you notice compared to Black Fridays in the past? Leave a comment below to keep the conversation going, or send me an email at [email protected].