Once the leftover stuffing and cranberry sauce have been burped into Tupperware containers and tryptophan dreams have faded away, Thanksgiving is past and Black Friday has begun.
Black Friday in Virginia: Winchester police are promising extra patrols that day while the Fairfax County police and AAA both offer safety tips for shoppers. An interchange on I-581 in Roanoke is scheduled to open just in time for the shopping rush. In Rockbridge County, Virginia Safari Park hosts a charity drive and in Loudoun County, Morven Park hosts an annual five-on-five flag football tournament. In Hampton Roads, stores are preparing for post-Thanksgiving crowds and, across the state, ABC stores are marking down prices on liquor bottles, showing how even socialists can get into the holiday spirit.
The traditional beginning of the Christmas shopping season — though this designation is becoming obsolete as holiday decorations creep into store displays before Halloween and cyber deals begin to be advertised around Labor Day — Black Friday dates at least to the 1930s, even if it did not have a name until the 1960s and merchants did not tout it until the 1980s. President Franklin Roosevelt caused a stir in 1939 when he moved Thanksgiving from the traditional last Friday in November to the fourth Thursday, in order to give holiday shoppers an extra week to fill their stockings.
Even though they do not celebrate Thanksgiving, Black Friday shopping has spread to countries like “Australia, Germany and Mexico where the government and retailers got together to create a weekend of consumer initiatives,” according to University of Birmingham marketing professor Isabelle Szmigin. In the United Kingdom, she says, Black Friday began to take off in 2013, when the Walmart-owned retailer, Asda, offered huge discounts on electronics and related items.
There is some disagreement over whether Black Friday shopping is on the upswing or downturn. It’s never been precisely true that the Friday after Thanksgiving is the busiest shopping day of the year, although it may seem like that to shoppers and harried store clerks. The busiest shopping day is the Saturday before Christmas but Black Friday has seemed, historically, to give the shopping season its biggest boost.
Last year, WTVR-TV reporter Joe St. George suggested that “Black Friday shopping could be losing its luster” and some academic research claimed to back that up.
Asking “Is Black Friday a thing of the past?,” University of Rochester marketing professor George Cook wrote in November 2015 that “consumer surveys bear out the move away from Black Friday. Almost a third of shoppers said they planned to do most of their shopping before the week of Black Friday, while about 66% of millennials said they intend to complete a majority of their shopping by December 1.”
A year later (yesterday, as it happens), however, Ohio State University economist Jay L. Zagorsky threw cold water on the notion that Black Friday is in decline.
Each year the National Retail Federation issues numbers showing how many people plan to begin shopping the moment they finish devouring their Thanksgiving pie. Last year 66 million adults said they would definitely go shopping on Thanksgiving weekend, while another 70 million said “maybe.” And 74 percent of them planned to shop on Black Friday. When you have 136 million people intending to do the same thing at the same time, it’s clear the day remains important.
Zagorsky weighs the evidence and asks
So is Black Friday dying or booming? The National Retail Federation’s data show lots of people went shopping just after Thanksgiving. Census data show steadily lower sales in bricks and mortar stores year after year, plus rising internet sales. Time use data show shopping is now taking less of the typical person’s day.
My answer is that while brick-and-mortar stores are slowly becoming less relevant for daily purchases, people love events. Black Friday in the future will likely become more of a special occasion where many people go back to retail stores that in their day-to-day life they will typically ignore.
If, as Calvin Coolidge asserted, “the business of America is business,” then the post-Thanksgiving commercial surge is as American as pumpkin pie. Black Friday has been supplemented by Cyber Monday and by Small Business Saturday, which is being promoted in Alexandria, Charlottesville, Fredericksburg, Staunton, and Virginia Beach, among other localities.
Whether people are shopping in person at brick-and-mortar stores or on line (a 2015 Reuters/Ipsos poll found that 51 percent of those surveyed planned to do most of their holiday shopping on Amazon.com), the four-day Thanksgiving weekend is a commercial whirlwind.
