How the biggest event in retail became a disappointment

Black Friday has long been defined by massive crowds, rock-bottom prices, and rabid consumers willing to bite, scratch, 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 on the rise, and in a world where Black Friday begins in September, consumers are anxious, unsure if the deals they’re getting are that good.

“The integrity of the event is pretty much gone,” said Mark Cohen, former CEO of Sears Canada, who spent a decade as director of retail studies at Columbia Business School. “In the past, a Black Friday price was the best you could ever find for something…and you would never see it again. In today’s day and age, promotional prices get better and better from a consumer standpoint the closer you get to the holiday.”

While Black Friday remains a crucial day for many retailers and is still arguably the most popular shopping day of the year, it is no longer defined by personal 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.

This means a shift in strategy for retailers who have long participated in Black Friday, including… Walmart, goal and Messi. Some, like Kohl’s, launch their holiday sales early in the season. Others, like Walmart, distribute the promotions into separate events — one in mid-November, another over the weekend, and a final one-day event on Cyber ​​Monday. Many others plan to remain closed on Thanksgiving but will still have deals online during the holiday.

“I still remember standing in lines outside stores waiting for those special offers that every retailer advertises,” said Dinesh Shah, department chair and professor of marketing at Georgia State University’s Robinson College of Business. “Whereas now it takes weeks and several days, most of the time consumers do it from home through online sales.”

Over the past six years, more people shopped online on Black Friday than in-store, and traffic has been relatively flat after a post-Covid spike, according to data from the National Retail Federation and Placer.ai, an analytics firm that uses anonymized data from mobile devices to estimate total visits to sites.

Since 2021, Black Friday store visits have been consistently more than 50% higher than the daily average for the entire year, but store traffic volume the day after Thanksgiving isn’t really growing, according to data from Placer.ai.

From 2023 to 2025, the number of Millennial and Gen It’s largely flat for Gen Z and baby boomer shoppers over that time period, according to Bank of America Institute data.

Meanwhile, the amount of money people spend during the so-called “Turkey 5” — the period of shopping days that runs from Thanksgiving to Cyber ​​Monday — has declined for two straight years, according to the NRF. Between 2019 and 2024, spending fell by about 13%.

This decline is expected to continue this year, with consumers planning to spend 4% less on average during Türkiye 5, according to a recent Deloitte survey.

“There will still be a day of highlights from retailers, whether it’s a door buster, some additional promotions, etc.,” said Tiffany Yeh, managing director and partner in Boston Consulting Group’s consumer practice. “But it’s more muted.”

When the modern version of Black Friday became popular in the 1980s, it took a full year of planning to implement, Cohen said.

“The art was to convince the vendor to give you a huge discount on cost so that you could create this very compelling offer to the consumer that would … benefit you the rest of the holiday season,” he recalls. “But it takes a tremendous amount of work.”

Retailers had to choose the perfect product, set the perfect price, and ensure that their competitors did not know about their promotional plans. Next, they had to make sure they ordered enough stock to sell, but not so early that it might cause a riot.

But over time, as Black Friday became more popular, retailers began extending the shopping holiday so that their biggest sales of the year could last longer than one day. First, stores opened early on Friday morning, then began opening on Thanksgiving, and then promotions began the day before. As consumers began to expect discounts on more than one group of products, promotions spread to items in each section.

“In other words, in order to preserve the flight, they started to ease it,” Cohen said.

As discounts spread throughout the store, the operational work behind inventory and staffing has become more difficult to manage, prompting retailers to deploy promotions even earlier, Yeh said.

“It’s always been difficult to provide significant labor for a short period of time,” she said. “If it’s just for one day, people won’t necessarily want to sign up for it, versus, if it’s for a longer season, you’re more likely to get the team members needed and also be able to train them.”

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

Online shopping has been on a slow and steady rise for 20 years, but during the COVID-19 pandemic, the adoption rate has skyrocketed. Now, retailers don’t need to make a big in-person offer on Black Friday, because online sales increasingly outpace those in stores.

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

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

Of course, there’s also debate about how good Black Friday discounts are, especially in a weak economy where retailers rely heavily on promotions to boost sales at the same time they raise prices to offset tariffs.

“Rampant discounting” across the industry — before, during and after the holiday shopping season — has left many consumers feeling “skeptic” about promotions in general, said Sonia Lapinski, head of the global fashion practice for consulting firm AlixPartners. Some promotions this holiday season may also hide price increases, bringing the cost down to what it was before the ticket price was raised, Lapinski said.

“They used to have the ability to shop around and look for these discounts, and now there’s a lack of trust,” Lapinski said. “They’re tired of doing it, and there’s a lack of confidence that they’re actually getting the valuable part of it.”

For example, brands such as gap, Levi Strauss and Under the armor Black Friday sales began on Thanksgiving, and the promotions were similar to those offered earlier in the season.

“The whole idea of ​​creating urgency is kind of foolish and gone,” Cohen said. “Like many headlines that claim to offer a deal, the deal is a scam.”