Black Friday used to be the day when consumers were ready to claw their way to rock bottom prices at retailers across the country.
Television vans and reporters would arrive in the pre-dawn hours to talk to frenzied shoppers waiting for the chance to get their hands on a $3 toaster or a $100 television. But these days, Black Friday isn’t the one-day retail bonanza that it used to be.
Stores are opening later, foot traffic is flat, and retailers are offering discounts weeks in advance. Customers, wary of the “big deals” and “massive savings” promised, are more cautious about how and what they spend their money on.
“The integrity of the event is pretty much gone,” Mark Cohen, former CEO of Sears Canada, who spent a decade as the director of retail studies at Columbia Business School, told CNBC. “Back in the day, a Black Friday price was the best you could ever find on something … never to be seen again. In today’s day and age, promotional pricing just gets better and better from a consumer’s point of view the closer you get to the holiday.”
To be sure, millions of shoppers are expected to visit malls and other big-box stores on Friday. The rub is that millions more will stay home, away from the crowds and the pushing and shoving, to shop online.
“My mother, my aunts, and my cousins used to get up really early and go every year,” Angie Rebman of Midlothian, Virginia, told the Washington Examiner. “It’s a tradition. We’ll go again this year but it’s more about nostalgia and less about getting a deal.”
It’s the same for Denish Shah, a professor of marketing at Georgia State University’s Robinson College of Business.
“I still recall queuing up outside stores waiting for those special deals that every retailer would advertise,” he said. “Whereas now it goes over weeks, over multiple days, and most of the time the consumers are doing it from the comfort of their home through online sales.”
Over the past half-decade, more shoppers have opted to go online than into stores on Black Friday, according to data from the National Retail Federation. Still, a record 186.9 million people are planning to shop from Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday, according to NRF. The number is up more than 3 million total shoppers from 2024’s record of 183.4 million.
“The holidays are an important part of many consumers’ budgets, and that trend is especially true this season,” NRF Vice President of Industry and Consumer Insights Katherine Cullen said. “As a record number of shoppers are expected this Thanksgiving weekend, retailers are prepared to meet the needs of consumers with great value and convenience.”
Despite the buying frenzy forecast, Black Friday itself has lost the edge in the extended weekend shopping event.
The day became popular because sales were the best on that day. But as the retail holiday became better known, shops started extending sales. They opened their doors earlier and earlier, some even on Thanksgiving. Then came the hefty pre-Black Friday sales. When shoppers also demanded more sales on more items, shops started spreading the discounts to almost every department. That meant, no huge deal on one or two products, but slightly lower prices on more items.
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“In other words,” Cohen said, “to sustain the ride, they started to dilute it.”
Rebman, who still went shopping at Short Pump Mall in Richmond on Friday, added, “We went as a family but it’s just not the same anymore.”