Black Friday is traditionally the day a lot of people begin their holiday shopping, thanks to the encouragement of sales and deals on a plethora of different items. But truth be told, it’s been Black Friday for a while now.
For most retailers, it’s been Black Friday for at least this entire week. For some, it’s been even longer than that. Before you know it, it’ll be Cyber Monday for the next several days too.
“The holiday shopping season is the single most important shopping season,” University of Maryland marketing professor Jie Zhang said. “This is also a time that retailers all know that they’re facing stiff competition with each other, so they’re all trying to outperform each other by moving sales earlier and earlier.”
Which is why the sales have been in effect for so long, and why she said you should have started your Black Friday shopping way before Friday.
“Black Friday now will be like a crescendo instead of the official start of the holiday season. You could be missing out some hot items that might sell out before Black Friday,” she said.
Luckily, Cyber Monday is only a few days away, and it too lasts more than a day now.
“I do not see a real difference between Black Friday sales versus Cyber Monday sales,” Zhang told WTOP. “In fact, it is all becoming a big block.”
While in-store shopping is still far and away the main driver for retailers, online growth continues to outpace in-store growth, which is another reason why the sales are starting earlier.
“Because of the anticipated surge in online shopping, they need to deal with this drastic increase in the amount of shipping that they have to handle,” Zhang said. “So that’s another reason why they’re offering deals earlier and trying to spread deals out in a wider time span to reduce the burden of shipping.”
That’s probably never going to change, since online shopping makes it easier to have gifts shipped directly to the recipient. But the deals that are available now won’t, as the commercials say, last forever.
Whenever the Cyber Monday sales end, whether it’s actually on Monday or sometime later in the week, there’s a good chance you’ll be waiting until after Christmas before you see anything similar again.
“Going into December, usually two weeks before Christmas, retailers may be winding down on their discounts and the sales,” she said, “and capitalizing on the fact that procrastinators still need to do shopping and therefore they should pay more.”
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