How retail's biggest event turned into a disappointment

Black Friday has long been defined by massive crowds, rock-bottom prices, and rabid consumers willing to bite, claw, and claw their way to the best deals of the season. But these days, retail's biggest holiday looks a little different.

Stores are opening later, foot traffic is steady, online shopping is increasing, and in a world where Black Friday begins in September, consumers are cautious, unsure whether the deals they're getting are all that good.

“The integrity of the event has pretty much disappeared,” said Mark Cohen, former chief executive of Sears Canada, who spent a decade as director of retail studies at Columbia Business School. “In the past, the Black Friday price was the best you could find on something… that would never be seen again. In today's day and age, promotional prices get better and better from a consumer's point of view the closer the holiday gets.”

While Black Friday remains a critical day for many retailers and remains arguably the most popular shopping day of the year, it is no longer defined by the in-person experience. Millions of shoppers are expected to visit malls, department stores and specialty retailers on Friday, but millions more are expected to stay home and shop online from their phones and computers.

That means a shift in strategy for retailers who have long gone all-in on Black Friday, including Walmart, Aim and Macy's. Some, like Kohl's, are launching their holiday sales early in the season. Others, like Walmart, are spacing promotions into separate events: one in mid-November, another over the holiday weekend, and a final one-day event on Cyber ​​Monday. Many others planned to remain closed on Thanksgiving Day but still had online deals throughout the holiday.

“I still remember standing in line outside stores waiting for those special deals that all the retailers were advertising,” said Denish Shah, department chair and marketing professor at Georgia State University's Robinson College of Business. “Whereas now it lasts weeks, several days and most of the time consumers do it from the comfort of their home through online sales.”

Over the past six years, more people shopped online on Black Friday than in stores, and in-person traffic has remained relatively stable following a post-Covid surge, according to data from the National Retail Federation and Placer.ai, an analytics firm that uses anonymized mobile device data to estimate overall visits to locations.

Since 2021, Black Friday store visits have been consistently more than 50% higher than the daily average throughout the year, but the amount of in-person traffic in stores the day after Thanksgiving is not actually growing, data from Placer.ai shows.

From 2023 to 2025, the number of millennial and Generation X consumers who plan to make the majority of their purchases on Black Friday has decreased. It's largely stable for Gen Z and baby boomer shoppers over that period, according to data from the Bank of America Institute.

Meanwhile, the amount of money people spend during the so-called Turkey 5 (the period of shopping days from Thanksgiving to Cyber ​​Monday) has declined for two years in a row, according to the NRF. Between 2019 and 2024, spending fell almost 13%.

That decline is expected to continue this year, with consumers planning to spend 4% less on average during the Turkish Five, according to a recent Deloitte survey.

“There will still be a day of retail highlights, whether it's doorbusters, … certain additional promotions, etc.,” said Tiffany Yeh, managing director and partner in Boston Consulting Group's consumer practice. “But it's quieter.”

When the modern version of Black Friday became popular in the 1980s, it took an entire year of planning to achieve, Cohen said.

“The art was to convince a supplier to give you a huge discount on the cost so you could create this tremendously attractive offer for the consumer that would then… benefit them for the rest of the holiday season,” he recalled. “But it took an enormous amount of work.”

Retailers had to choose the perfect product, set the perfect price, and make sure their competitors didn't find out about their promotional plans. Then, they had to make sure they ordered enough inventory to sell it, but not so soon as to cause a disturbance.

But over time, as Black Friday became more popular, retailers began extending the shopping holiday so that their biggest tailwinds of the year could last longer than a single day. First, stores opened earlier on Friday morning, then they started opening on Thanksgiving Day, and then promotions started the day before. When consumers began to expect discounts on more than a handful of products, promotions were extended to items in all departments.

“In other words,” Cohen said, “to sustain the ride, they started watering it down.”

As discounts spread throughout the store, the operational feat behind inventory and staffing became even more difficult to manage, leading retailers to distribute promotions even earlier, Yeh said.

“It's always been difficult to staff so significantly over a short period of time,” he said. “If it's just for one day, people won't necessarily want to sign up for that, but if it's for a longer season, then you're more likely to get the necessary team members and be able to train them as well.”

At the same time, consumer habits began to change in the context.

Online shopping had seen a slow and steady rise for 20 years, but during the Covid-19 pandemic, adoption skyrocketed. Now, retailers don't need to put on such a big show in person on Black Friday, because online sales are increasingly outpacing those in stores.

Making Black Friday a season-long event also makes it easier for consumers to spread their own spending, Shah said.

“November and December are two different payment periods for many consumers,” he said. “It makes a difference if they can spread their expenses over two pay periods instead of just one.”

Of course, there's also debate about how good Black Friday discounts really are, especially in a weak economy where retailers rely heavily on promotions to boost sales while raising prices to offset tariffs.

“Rampant discounting” across the industry — before, during and after the holiday shopping season — has left many consumers feeling “skeptical” about promotions in general, said Sonia Lapinsky, director of the global fashion practice at consulting firm AlixPartners. Some promotions this holiday season could also be disguising price increases, lowering the cost to what it was before the ticket price was increased, Lapinsky said.

“They've had the power to cross-buy and look for these discounts, and now there's just this lack of trust,” Lapinsky said. “They're tired of doing that and there's a lack of confidence that they're really getting what they're worth.”

For example, brands like Gap, Levi Strauss and under armor They began their Black Friday sales on Thanksgiving Day and the promotions were comparable to those offered earlier in the season.

“The idea of ​​creating urgency is a little silly and doesn't exist anymore,” Cohen said. “Like so many headlines that supposedly offer a deal, the deal is something of a scam.”