Yahoo Finance Are Retailers Destroying Black Friday?
If Black Friday starts on a Wednesday, can it really be called Black Friday?
It's a question worth asking, since Black Friday, by some accounts, began last week, on Nov. 20, when the online retail giant Amazon.com started offering Black Friday sales a full week before the actual Black Friday. Some car manufacturers are running Black Friday sales that last an entire month, and you may recall that for the past couple of summers, some retailers have offered Black Friday in July sales.
And in recent years, of course, many stores have been opening on Thanksgiving Day. Generally stores have opened in the evening, but even that isn't quite the case any longer. This Thanksgiving Day, J.C. Penney is opening its doors at 3 p.m. Kmart, meanwhile, is opening some stores at 6 a.m., and it will remain open for the next 42 hours.
You can put Norma Rosenthal in the camp that would rather see Black Friday remain on Black Friday. Rosenthal, who owns a consulting firm and lives in Woodinville, Washington, has been shopping on Black Friday with her daughter, who is 33, for the last 15 years. Each year, they start with coffee and breakfast at 6 a.m., and then they shop at Target.
"Then it is on to Old Navy for pajama bottoms, holiday socks, clothes for the little ones. Next stops are J. Crew and Banana Republic for their before-noon discounts," she says.
At noon, they have lunch. Then they attack the department stores for more gifts, grab a midafternoon cookie snack and are home by 4 p.m.
"Stores that open on Turkey Day do not interest us, no matter how fantastic the price is, even on an item that we would covet. The holiday is unequivocally reserved for family," Rosenthal says. She feels the stores that are open on Thanksgiving are almost being disrespectful to family time.
But Jill Heisterkamp sees it differently. She and her sister have been Black Friday shopping in Fort Dodge, Iowa, for about a decade, with Heisterkamp's niece joining them in recent years.
"Having some stores open on Thanksgiving has helped to spread out our mad rush a bit and enabled us to better prioritize which sales we will hit first round and second round. Yes, we hit most stores twice," Heisterkamp says.
From her vantage point, the employees working on Thanksgiving don't seem to mind. "One woman laughed that it meant she left the cleanup to the rest of her family," Heisterkamp says.
Still, somewhere along the way, Black Friday has become more of a concept rather than an actual day. How did this happen, and does it matter? In other words, does it diminish the shopping fun of the actual Black Friday, and what does it mean for Black Friday in the future?
Some Black Friday history. Black Friday is said to have its name because it's the day when retailers start to show a profit for the year and are no longer in the red.
But that's a myth. The term "Black Friday" has been around since at least the 1800s, although it wasn't used to describe the biggest shopping day of the year. It was used to describe Sept. 24, 1869, a stock market catastrophe that occurred on a Friday. Ever since, if the nation or a region of the country has had a devastating day, especially one involving a financial drubbing, it has been dubbed a black one. For instance, Oct. 29, 1929, when the stock market collapsed, ushering in the Great Depression, that was Black Tuesday.
So in the 1960s, when Philadelphia police were obliged to work 12-hour shifts on the Friday and Saturday after Thanksgiving, to control traffic from the mobs doing their holiday shopping, weary officers referred to the days as Black Friday and Black Saturday. Black Friday, a way to describe the most insane shopping day of the year, spread to other cities.
In an age before social media, however, it took a while before the name had much currency. It really wasn't until the mid-1980s that the phrase took off in the media.
Black Friday as something of a national phenomenon. The shopping day became epic with its doorbuster deals about 15 years ago, says Puneet Manchanda, professor of marketing at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
Retailers, he says, "wanted to create an event around the beginning of the holiday season in order to jump-start consumer holiday spending."
And for a number of years, all was well and normal in the retail universe. Shoppers would wake up in the dead of the night and show up at stores early, and their friends and family who weren't into that sort of thing would smile and roll their eyes. That's just how it was. But then began the race to open the doors before any other stores, creating this current calendar creep of starting Black Friday earlier and earlier, with customers welcomed on Thanksgiving, an unthinkable action a decade or two ago.
Stores want to open first for good reason, says Yakov Bart, a marketing professor at Northeastern University in Boston.
"Most shoppers' spending is likely to be done in the first one or two stores she visits," Bart says.
Or he. It's hardly only women who shop on Black Friday.
"I'm a die-hard Black Friday shopper," says Bill Connolly, a 27-year-old marketer and comedian who owns Funny Business Productions in Boston. "It's become a tradition for a friend and I each year to go at 2 a.m., the day after Thanksgiving, to get the best deals we possibly can get. Over the past five years, we've built a bit of a group that tags along and records the deals we're able to get on social media."
Connolly, however, would like to keep Black Friday on Black Friday.
"I think that the rolling back of the event is a bad thing for shoppers," Connolly says. He understands the business reasons, but he says he enjoys having Thanksgiving with the family "and then turning attention to the event at midnight. It's like a race where the gun goes off for everyone together."
Will Black Friday cease to someday exist? You might think so. After all, if Black Friday is someday every day, will the real Black Friday even matter?
Dan Rajaratnam, a clinical professor of marketing at the University of Texas--Dallas doesn't think Black Friday is going anywhere, mostly because shoppers have become conditioned to expect great deals on that day.
"Stores need these shoppers to reach their holiday sales targets," Rajaratnam says. "So, even if Black Friday sales are starting earlier each year, there will always be a Black Friday sale. You can't take away from consumers what they are used to."
As an example, he cites how in 2012, J.C. Penney tried to oust most of its sales and simply offer everyday low pricing, instead of showing severe markdowns and making shoppers feel as if they were getting a deal. Consumers were baffled and, for a time, fled the store in droves. J.C. Penney quickly went back to business as usual.
It may make some consumers happy to know that Bart thinks it's unlikely stores will soon co-opt Wednesday, the day before Thanksgiving, and turn that into something everyone calls Black Friday Wednesday. Sure, it could be done, but Bart says that would cut into one of the biggest travel days of the year. He makes a good point.
Despite a couple of stores opening during the daytime on Thanksgiving Day, Bart thinks stores will be careful about opening too early.
"No self-respecting mom would let her family skip Thanksgiving dinner, even for an amazing deal," he says.
But you never know. It isn't hard to imagine a not-so-far-off future when family and friends gather around the breakfast table for a turkey omelet before hitting the malls.
Or maybe after everyone's Thanksgiving breakfast, the family will gather around their tablets, laptops and smartphones instead. The calendar confusion isn't only relegated to Black Friday. As you probably know, Cyber Monday is a day reserved for Black Friday-like deals online. Or it was. This year, however, Walmart decided to throw out the calendar and announced that the store will be offering its 2,000 Cyber Monday specials at 8 p.m. EST -- Sunday evening.
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