What Black Friday’s history tells us about holiday shopping in 2024

NEW YORK (AP) Later this week, Black Friday will begin the post-Thanksgiving retail frenzy, bringing the holiday shopping season to a head.

Due in great part to the convenience of online buying and habits developed during the COVID-19 pandemic, the yearly sales event no longer generates the midnight mall crowds or doorbuster mayhem of recent decades.

Retailers have already spent weeks hammering customers with advertisements and exclusive deals in an attempt to win over hesitant buyers. Nevertheless, tens of millions of American consumers are anticipated to spend money on Black Friday this year, whether they choose to visit stores or click on many emails offering enormous discounts.

The National Retail Federation and consumer research firm Prosper Insights & Analytics predict that 183.4 million Americans will buy in shops and online between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday. 131.7 million of them are anticipated to shop on Black Friday.

The Christmas spending environment is also being altered by increasingly early Black Friday-like sales and the growing popularity of other shopping occasions, such as Hello Cyber Monday.

What you need to know about the history of Black Friday and its current state in 2024 is provided here.

In 2024, when is Black Friday?

Every year, Black Friday occurs on the Friday following Thanksgiving, which is November 29 this year.

How old is Black Friday? What is the origin of its name?

Although the phrase “Black Friday” has been around for a few generations, it wasn’t necessarily connected to the modern-day Christmas shopping frenzy. For instance, the September 1869 gold market fall was well known as “Black Friday.”

However, the term’s usage in reference to shopping the day after Thanksgiving is most frequently linked to Philadelphia in the middle of the 20th century, when city employees, including police, had to deal with sizable crowds that gathered before the yearly Army-Navy football game and to capitalize on seasonal sales.

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For this reason, it is Black Friday, and the cab and bus drivers are calling. While observing a police officer attempt to regulate jaywalkers the day after Thanksgiving in 1975, a sales manager at a Gimbels department store told The Associated Press, “They think in terms of headaches it gives them.” Previous mentions go all the way back to the 1950s and 1960s.

Jie Zhang, a marketing professor at the Robert H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland, cites a 1951 article about Black Friday in a trade journal based in New York that claimed that many employees just called in sick the day after Thanksgiving in the hopes of enjoying a long holiday weekend.

Due to holiday demand, national retailers started asserting in the 1980s that Black Friday was the moment they transitioned from running in the red to operating in the black. However, experts caution that this interpretation should be viewed with caution because many retail businesses now turn a profit at different periods of the year.

In what ways has Black Friday changed over time?

Black Friday has gained notoriety in recent decades due to crowds of people in crowded stores. At midnight, endless queues of customers gathered in the expectation of finding significant savings.

However, the majority of holiday purchases, if not all of them, may now be bought online without ever setting foot in a store. E-commerce isn’t going away, even if foot traffic at malls and other shopping centers has increased since the pandemic began.

More than two decades have passed since the pinnacle of November sales at physical businesses. For instance, according to figures from the Commerce Department, e-commerce only made up 1.7% of all retail sales in the fourth quarter of 2003.

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It should come as no surprise that internet sales now account for a far larger portion of the market. According to figures from the Commerce Department, e-commerce made up roughly 17.1% of all nonadjusted retail sales during the fourth quarter of last year’s holiday season. This is higher than the 12.7% recorded at the end of 2019.

Beyond the growth of internet shopping, Jay Zagorsky, a clinical associate professor at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business, points out that several expensive things that used to draw customers in on Black Friday, like a new TV, are much less expensive now than they were decades ago.

Since the things usually associated with doorbuster discounts are now far less expensive, there is less need to wait in line at midnight, Zagorsky told The Associated Press in an email. He cited statistics from the Bureau of Labor Statistics that indicates the average cost of a television has decreased by 75% since 2014.

According to estimates from the National Retail Federation and Prosper Insights, the majority of Black Friday buyers (65%) still intended to purchase in stores this year, even if many people will do the majority of their shopping online.

Cyber Monday’s increase and Black Friday month

It’s no secret that Black Friday sales have expanded beyond a single day. Before Halloween, emails announcing seasonal sales now begin to arrive.

The holiday shopping season no longer begins on Black Friday. According to Zhang, it has evolved into the peak of the holiday shopping season over what seems like Black Friday month. A few retailers have made reference to Black Friday week in their updated official marketing.

According to Zhang, the rush can be explained by retailers attempting to outperform their rivals and handle delivery operations. By spreading out purchases, early holiday sales give shippers more time to finish shipments. Because shops would have taken them into consideration, Zhang does not anticipate that this year’s five fewer days between Thanksgiving and Christmas will result in a great deal of stress.

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“Black Friday is a name that consumers recognize and associate with big, limited-time bargains, so linking pre-Thanksgiving sales with it is also a marketing strategy,” Zhang said.

Following Black Friday, a number of post-Thanksgiving sales events, such as Cyber Monday and Small Business Saturday, which were recognized by the National Retail Federation’s online arm in 2005, keep consumers interested.

According to Adobe Analytics, U.S. customers spent $15.7 million per minute during the day’s peak sales hour and a record $12.4 billion on Cyber Monday in 2023. According to Adobe Analytics, they spent $9.8 billion online on Black Friday.

After Thanksgiving, enough people still like to shop in person, so it’s unlikely to go extinct, according to Zagorsky of Boston University.

He claimed that even while Black Friday’s importance is gradually waning, the shopping event is still a means of fostering relationships. Because of this social component, Black Friday will continue to be a significant day for merchants.

The Associated Press, 2024. All rights reserved. All rights reserved. It is prohibited to publish, broadcast, rewrite, or redistribute this content without authorization.

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