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

NEW YORK —

The Christmas shopping season is in full swing with Black Friday kicking off the post-Thanksgiving rush this week.

The annual sales event no longer creates the midnight mall crowds or door-buster chaos of decades past, largely due to the ease of online shopping and habits created during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Hoping to lure ambivalent consumers, retailers have already spent weeks bombarding customers with ads and early bird deals. Still, whether they’re visiting stores or clicking on countless emails promising huge savings, tens of millions of American shoppers are expected to spend on Black Friday itself this year.

Industry forecasts estimate that 183.4 million people will shop in U.S. stores and online between Thanksgiving and Cyber ​​Monday, according to the National Retail Federation and consumer research firm Prosper Insights & Analytics. Of that number, 131.7 million are expected to shop on Black Friday.

At the same time, earlier and earlier Black Friday-like promotions, as well as the growing strength of other shopping events (hello, Cyber ​​Monday), continue to change the holiday spending landscape.

Here’s what you need to know about the history of Black Friday and where things stand in 2024.

When is Black Friday in 2024?

Black Friday falls on the Friday after Thanksgiving every year, which is November 29 this year.

How old is Black Friday? Where does its name come from?

The concept of “Black Friday” is several generations old, but it was not always associated with the Christmas shopping frenzy that we know today. The gold market crash in September 1869, for example, was especially dubbed Black Friday.

However, the term’s use in relation to shopping the day after Thanksgiving is most commonly traced to Philadelphia in the mid-20th century—when police and other city workers had to deal with large crowds that gathered before the annual Army-Navy football game and to take advantage of seasonal sales.

“That’s why the bus drivers and cab drivers today call it ‘Black Friday.’ They think in terms of the headache it gives them,” a Gimbel’s department store sales manager told The Associated Press in 1975 as he watched a police officer try to control jaywalkers the day after Thanksgiving.

Previous references date back to the 1950s and 1960s.

Jie Zhang, a professor of marketing at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business, points to a 1951 mention of “Black Friday” in a New York-based trade publication — which noted that many workers simply called in sick the next day. after Thanksgiving hoping to get a long holiday weekend.

Beginning in the 1980s, national retailers began claiming that Black Friday represented when they went from operating in the red to operating in the black thanks to holiday demand. But since many retail businesses now operate in the black at different times of the year, this interpretation should be taken with a grain of salt, experts say.

How has Black Friday evolved?

In recent decades, Black Friday has become notorious for flooding people into jam-packed stores. Endless lines of shoppers camped out at midnight hoping to score deep discounts.

But online shopping has made it possible to make most, if not all, holiday purchases without ever setting foot inside a store. And while foot traffic in malls and other shopping areas has returned since the start of the pandemic, e-commerce is not going away.

November sales in physical stores peaked more than 20 years ago. In 2003, for example, e-commerce accounted for 1.7% of total retail sales in the fourth quarter, according to Commerce Department data.

Not surprisingly, online sales make up a much bigger slice of the pie today. For last year’s holiday season, e-commerce accounted for about 17.1% of all unadjusted retail sales in the fourth quarter, Commerce Department data show. This is an increase from 12.7% seen at the end of 2019.

In addition to the increase in online shopping, some big-ticket items that used to get shoppers in the door on Black Friday — like a new TV — are significantly cheaper than they were decades ago, notes Jay Zagorsky, a clinical associate professor at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business.

“There is less need to stand in line at midnight when the items typically associated with doorbuster sales are now much cheaper,” Zagorsky told The Associated Press via email. He pointed to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics showing that the average price of a TV has dropped 75% since 2014.

While many people will do most of their Black Friday shopping online, projections from the National Retail Federation and Prosper Insights showed that most Black Friday shoppers (65%) still planned to shop in stores this year.

Black Friday ‘month’ and the rise of Cyber ​​Monday

It’s no secret that Black Friday sales don’t last just 24 hours anymore. Emails with promising holiday deals now start arriving before Halloween.

“Black Friday is no longer the start of the Christmas shopping season. It has become the crescendo of the Christmas shopping season in what now feels like ‘Black Friday month,'” Zhang said. Some retailers have updated their official marketing to refer to “Black Friday week.”

Retailers trying to get a leg up on the competition and manage shipping logistics help explain the rush, Zhang said. Offering early holiday deals spreads out purchases, giving shippers more breathing room to complete orders. Zhang therefore does not expect the five fewer days between Thanksgiving and Christmas this year to cause significant strain because retailers would have taken them into account.

Linking pre-Thanksgiving sales to Black Friday is also a marketing ploy since it’s a name consumers recognize and associate with big, limited-time deals, Zhang said.

Several post-Thanksgiving sales events keep shoppers enticing after Black Friday, including Small Business Saturday and Cyber ​​Monday, which the National Retail Federation’s online arm designated in 2005.

US consumers spent a record $12.4 billion on Cyber ​​Monday in 2023 and $15.7 million per minute during the day’s peak hours, according to Adobe Analytics. On Black Friday, they spent $9.8 billion online, Adobe Analytics said.

Enough people still enjoy shopping in person after Thanksgiving that the activity is unlikely to die out, said Zagorsky of Boston University.

While Black Friday’s significance “diminishes a bit” over time, the shopping event is still “a way to connect with others,” he said. “This social aspect is important and will not go away, ensuring that Black Friday remains an important day for retailers.”