Even though my family didn’t shop as often during Black Friday while growing up:
My only memory (from my younger days) was when we went to a store before they closed up for the day, and since they were planning on closing the store for good, deals ranged between 50-70% off all items, maybe even more. But since we went later in the day, it wasn’t as crowded or busy, when compared to earlier in the day.
Furthermore, since a majority of us miss great deals and discounts from back in the day: I wonder if Black Friday will ever go back to what it used to be:
Waiting in line before stores open, 50% off or more, buy one get one free, etc
I’m old enough to remember a time before “black Friday” was a thing. That’s what we should go back to. And getting rid of “cyber Monday” that lasts two weeks.
No. It’s become so fixed a thing that it’s now even here in Canada, where the Original Black Friday never made any sense. We never had a Thursday off for Thanksgiving, which lead to everyone also taking this Friday off, so they were available for huge pre-Christmas shopping sprees.
So if we’re having it in Canada, and it’s spreading to be a full week or more on both sides of actual “Black Friday”, there’s no way the US will ever put it back in the can.
I don’t think it will go back. It used to be an unwritten agreement between retailers that they’d be closed Thanksgiving day then open at the crack of dawn the next morning. The black Friday ads would have been delivered with the previous Sunday’s newspaper, for paper carriers it was historically the largest newspaper delivered of the year.
Both with e-commerce becoming the main advertising + sales channel and the retailers pushing black Friday as far back as being open on Thanksgiving day the whole thing seems to have fizzled out.
When Black Friday started to actually mean Thanksgiving day is when we stopped going. I objected to making retail workers come in on a holiday, and we usually weren’t done with our own meal until quite late in the day anyway.
I didn’t pay a lot of attention, but it seemed that this year Black Friday sales started a week ahead. I didn’t notice a lot that was interesting on the day itself. Plus people began noticing the sale items were often crap, and you could get a lot of them just as cheaply afterwards. So I doubt it will ever go back.
Amen. I recently looked at the log of when I bought books back in the late '60s early '70s and I noticed that I used to go into New York right before Christmas, and not consider it very crowded. No Black Friday then, of course.
I agree. In-person Black Fridays are just too dangerous. IMO, no special deal on a material object that is not essential to survival is worth braving the frenzied mobs of animals for.
Not to mention that many of those door buster, danger causing sales were so limited in numbers that you got there stupid early to get the promo, risked getting crushed in the mob, and STILL didn’t get it, because only the first half dozen or so who got there did.
I mean, there’s plenty of things to dislike about the current model, but fewer near-scams, and of course, less physical risk.
I remember the local TV news sending helicopters to fly over the big mall on Friday showing how full the parking lot was.
The big mall is now moribund, they are leasing out the parking lots to local car dealers for storage and the TV stations are getting rid of the helicopters.
This, and so many other things, are permanent changes.
The commercial elements now appears in Australia as well. Working for a consumer electronics firm, it’s a major marketing campaign, which offends me. Because in Australia Black Friday is the much more deadly affair of the 1939 bushfires which were unstoppable with the available equipment, burned out 2 million acres of Victoria and killed 71 people.
