When's the best time to start buying gifts for the holidays? At midnight right after Thanksgiving, abandoning your family for your chance for a cheap blender. For many people in the United States, the holiday season starts with Thanksgiving mostly due to its proximity to the new year and the jam-packed nature of December. That has also made it the perfect opportunity for people to start looking for gifts, by taking the following Friday as personal day to give themselves an extended four-day weekend. Naturally, companies would quickly capitalize on this behavior with the advent of Black Friday as one of the busiest shopping seasons of the year where big chains across America attempt to tempt people into a weekend binge of consumerism.
Black Friday has distinguished itself as a day of infamy over the decades. Horror stories of violent outbreaks and severe injuries at retail stores have become familiar enough that media has mocked the enthusiasm for years. One prominent example of such behavior happened in 2008 when “a crowd of more than 2,000 shoppers waiting at Walmart store on Long Island began pounding and pressing on the glass doors a few minutes before the scheduled 5 a.m. opening time. The doors shattered and shoppers stampeded through, fatally trampling a worker”, which inspired South Park’s Black Friday trilogy in 2013. Thankfully such occurrence seems to be becoming a rarity since then.
This shift can likely be attributed to the explosive adoption of online retailers and the revolutionary convenience of free shipping. Now, what was once a day that could be considered a hazard for people looking for cheap gifts has evolved into a long drip feed of deals which culminate into the familiar frenzy of desperate shoppers. Except shoppers are much harder to entice with a handful of doorbuster deals in the comforts of their own home. Secrets have also lost a lot of appeal due to the ease that leaks can happen in large, multi-level retail chains like Walmart and Target. This forces stores to adapt and reveal deals well in advance through as many information avenues as possible, whether it be newspaper ads or store specific subscriptions. They want your money, and the competition has fundamentally shifted between companies instead of consumers. People can plan out what they want to buy in advance and further temptations will likely not lead to a stampede. Digital storefronts and other factors have also lead to the closure of thousands of physical retailers over the years giving people few options even to attempt camping out. This is especially true in urban areas which have the infrastructure available for a smooth delivery. There has also been some pushback by families who find being targeted by corporations right after a holiday to be very unsavory leading to a soft boycott of the corporate holiday.
Cyber Monday on the hand is a much more recent phenomenon, which has traditionally focused on tech-based deals. As a reasonably modern invention it has quickly adopted the new model of spreading out sales throughout a week effectively creating half a month of solid deals. Combining these factors has lead to the much more palatable method of introducing arrangements in weeks prior. Allowing for a pattern which makes a lot of sense, after all these items likely won’t be needed for weeks if they’re meant to be gifts. This could be considered a mutually beneficial development for both customers and stores as well since stores will have to deal with the PR nightmare that the violence once left in its wake much less frequently. Retailers also have a way to infringe on Thanksgiving and beyond without stirring the pot.
Turkey Week
By: Levitt Lin