How retail’s biggest event became a letdown

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 bit different. 

Stores are opening their doors later, foot traffic is flat, online shopping is up and, in a world where Black Friday begins in September, consumers are wary, unsure if the deals they’re getting are even that good. 

“The integrity of the event is pretty much gone,” said Mark Cohen, former CEO of Sears Canada, who spent a decade as the director of retail studies at Columbia Business School. “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.”

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

That means a shift in strategy for retailers that have long gone all in on Black Friday, including Walmart, Target and Macy’s. Some, such as Kohl’s, are launching their holiday sales earlier in the season. Others, such as Walmart, are spacing out promotions in separate events — one in mid-November, another over the holiday weekend and a final, one-day event on Cyber Monday. Many others planned to stay closed on Thanksgiving but still had deals online during the holiday.

“I still recall queuing up outside stores waiting for those special deals that every retailer would advertise,” said Denish Shah, the department chair and professor of marketing at Georgia State University’s Robinson College of Business. “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.” 

For the last six years, more people shopped online on Black Friday than in-store, and foot traffic has been relatively flat following 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 overall visits to locations.

Since 2021, Black Friday store visits have consistently been more than 50% higher than the daily average for the full year, but the amount of foot traffic stores are getting on…