Black Friday Overview

Black Friday? More Like Bleak Friday!

By Lauren Weist

Everyone knows about Black Friday: it’s the biggest shopping day of the year! On this day, people everywhere flock to stores to try and get the biggest deals, often lining up days beforehand in order to get that cheap TV or the latest iPhone. People are crazed with the thought of saving money on their loved ones’ Christmas gifts, even going as far as breaking out into fistfights over the last Victoria’s Secret Pink hoodie on the racks. But then why, if people are so ravenous in their search for deals, are the net sales going down instead of up?

On Sunday, November 30th, Fortune Magazine released some shocking numbers: net sales for Black Friday dropped 10.3% since last year. This is alarming, because Black Friday is supposed to be the day that stores make the most money, and if they are unable to increase sales on that day, then how poor are their sales on a day-to-day scale? For me, those numbers are shocking. On the news, all the anchors could talk about was how Black Friday was starting earlier in order to accommodate for more sales, and my mom even jokingly called it “Black Thursday,” since most stores were opening at 6 o’clock on Thanksgiving. So how, if people were lined up for blocks and the deals were better than ever, did Black Friday end up losing numbers?

Some people blame it on Cyber Monday. Why leave your house, after all, if you can just log onto your computer and have all the deals at your fingertips? With sites like Amazon and Walmart, anything is accessible at an alarmingly low cost. Sites such as Amazon offer a whole week of sales, and showed increased customer purchases instead of decreased, rising as much as 19 percent. While this is great, it still hurts the local stores. Even though stores like Macy’s may have seen growth in their total sales, the physical stores may have felt that this Black Friday was lacking. And those lacking sales would reflect poorly on the store and the workers in it, giving their superiors something to shout about.

So will Black Friday continue being the unofficial holiday that it is, or will it fall prey to the megalomaniac that is Cyber Monday? Will stores leave their doors closed on Friday, instead focusing on blasting their online sales to the nation? As an avid lover of Black Friday shopping, I would hope not, but only time will tell.