By: Sentry Marketing Group

December 11, 2015

Everyone knows that the weekend after Thanksgiving is the traditional start of the big holiday shopping push here in the U.S.  Retailers offer big deals and extended shopping hours starting as early as Thanksgiving morning – and even earlier this year – to try to attract the masses’ holiday dollar.  

But this year, holiday shopping trends are starting to pose the question of whether these tactics are going to hold out as more and more shopping online at store like Themonstercycle, deals are offered earlier and earlier, and an increasingly outspoken public raises concerns about the effect of holiday store openings on workers and their families.

Brick & Mortar vs. Online Retail

The competition afforded to brick & mortar stores by ecommerce is nothing new.  For decades now, outlets like Amazon, Overstock.com, eBay, and others have been leeching away business from traditional stores.  Most large retailers, and a lot of smaller businesses, have worked to compensate by making their goods available online as well as in stores, sometimes even choosing to sell through these online-only outlets.  Nevertheless, Black Friday has until recently been thought of primarily as a “get out and shop” day, with stores opening in the wee hours of the morning and folks lining up to get exclusive deals on big ticket items.

This year, though, though in-store sales continued to dominate the day, brick & mortar’s hold appears to be slipping.  In-store sales were down by more than $1 billion from last year while online sales were up 14%; plus almost a million more people are reported to have shopped online than in stores.

This graphic from GoDataFeed illustrates some of the key data thus far:
Retail Recap: Black Friday – Cyber Monday 2015

A Longer Holiday Shopping Season

Part of the slippage has been attributed to the extension of holiday deals to weeks before Black Friday and up to Christmas, with deals in many cases getting better and better as we creep closer to Christmas Eve.  Data from Gallup shows that shoppers are spending more and more of their holiday dollars in the weeks leading up to Christmas after Thanksgiving weekend.  Average daily spending for the Big Week this year, for example, was about the same as for the week before Christmas last year.  And, in fact, according to a recent article in Entrepreneur, last year overall December 23rd retail sales trumped Black Friday.

Holiday Working Hours

The question then arises whether it is worth it to retailers to continue to push their opening hours through the holidays.  Besides the added expense of providing overtime or holiday pay, many retailers are asking whether it is worth drawing the wrath of the public to draw their workers away from their families on Thanksgiving.  This year, Change.org, an online forum for public petitions, saw some 123 petitions for sore closings on Thanksgiving, 50 more than last year.  More and more attention is being drawn to the impact of increasing working hours on the well-being of employees, and retailers like Target, K-Mart, and Walmart are getting some bad press around forcing employees to work on the holiday in order to accommodate extended store hours.  So much has been the pressure put on retailers that this year Staples, which stayed open on Thanksgiving last year, chose to close this year.  Meanwhile, REI based a large portion of its holiday campaign around not even being open on Black Friday, instead encouraging its employees – and customers – to spend the day outdoors, where the bulk of its products are used.

While it is clear that the holiday shopping frenzy is in way on the decline, it is equally clear that, with the rise of 24/7, low-overhead online shopping and the increase in competition prompting holiday deals that extend over two months and longer, consumers are feeling less pressure to focus their shopping on Thanksgiving weekend and retailers will do well to adjust their holiday campaigns accordingly as they look to the coming year.

Featured image by David Porter, via Flickr, Some rights reserved.