Black Friday Turning Gray

The post-Thanksgiving shopping day “Black Friday” is showing quite a bit of gray at the temples.  Is it time to let it go into retirement?  The timing could not be better given the extraordinary conditions of the coronavirus that have consumers behaving well out of the norm.  A good number of people may be occupied with contact tracing in the days following the annual American binge meal of turkey and trimmings.  Even the discovery of good toilet paper on sale may take a back seat to figuring out if grandma could need a ventilator.

Black Friday in the context of shopping simply referred in the early days to the bonanza that stores would experience as shoppers began using the four-day Thanksgiving week-end to begin shopping for Christmas presents and decorations.  It would cause the losses in the earlier part of the year, typically depicted in red ink, to turn to profits then depicted in black ink.  This was a phenomenon of the 1980s that eventually turned into the retail ‘contests’ of the early 2000s for the earliest shopping hours and best in-store bargains. 

Black Friday has since morphed from a one-day to a three-day event. In 2019, retailers reported receiving 190.0 million shoppers over the week-end and 84 million on Friday alone. Last year at least 75% of consumers were shopping on-line as well as in stores, reinforcing the shift of consumer interest to digital platforms.  Publisher and Internet watcher Ziff Davis, LLC. keeps track of all things Black Friday at www.BlackFriday.com

This year retailers appeared to have slapped a mask on Black Friday campaigns, trotting out their deals well ahead of Thanksgiving Day.  Walmart released its Black Friday 2020 on November 16^th.  The usual winner of Black Friday and Cyber Monday retail contests, Amazon.com promised weeks ago to ‘drop Black Friday deals everyday through the 27th.’  There has been no jockeying to get shoppers into physical stores on Thanksgiving Day or even early on Friday.  In-store door-buster deals appear to be gone in favor of dispensers for hand sanitizer and security officers to make certain shoppers are properly equipped with face masks.  

The best offers appear to be online and well ahead of the Cyber Monday shopping day.  Indeed, it could be that in the pandemic economy, Cyber Monday may experience the greatest impact as consumers spread their online shopping activities across more days  -  a period that seems to have begun in early November.  That has implications for purchase decisions and stymie retailers plans to lure in consumers before they have used their budget and otherwise trigger an impulse purchase through a well positioned display or on-line advertisement.  Thus the same pressures that are causing Black Friday to 'gray' may take the sizzle out of Cyber Monday as well.  

At its beginning Cyber Monday was a day of recovery from four days of overeating and drinking.  Positioned carefully in a cubicle or office a person could appear to be working while actually searching the Internet for those black pumps that look so cute on your BFF or a bargain on the computer game your teenagers now play at the neighbors.  The only cubicle in the lives of many consumers now is the hall closet where they hide with the dog from the pandemonium of work- and school-at-home.

With nearly all of 2020 having been 'cyber living,' it is  difficult to predict how the traditional shopping days will measure up to their history.  If nothing else the life altering experience of the coronovirus may have forever changed holiday shopping.

 

 

Neither the author of the Small Cap Strategist web log, Crystal Equity Research nor its affiliates have a beneficial interest in the companies mentioned herein.