The calendar is cruel to retailers this year. Thanksgiving comes on November 28, the latest it has been since 2002, making the upcoming holiday shopping season shorter than last year’s by six days. The compressed season will cost retailers $1.5 billion in online sales alone, according to a report released today by Adobe that doesn’t attempt to measure the fallout from lost in-store sales.
The calendar crunch is putting even more pressure on retailers to try to inch the holiday season ever earlier. And sure enough, stores continue to turn the day after Thanksgiving into one that is unrivaled in length, a sort of shopping solstice. At Kmart, for instance, Black Friday will last 41 hours this year with a start time at 6 a.m. on Thanksgiving itself. Macy’s and JC Penny, meanwhile, will also be open on Thanksgiving for the first time. Thanksgiving has also become the fastest-growing day for online shopping, according to Adobe, seemingly destined to overtake Black Friday (if not Cyber Monday).
So why not just get rid of the whole Black Friday tradition altogether? Retailers might actually be better off without the consumer frenzy. The Thanksgiving-less shoppers in places like the U.K., the Netherlands, and Canada spend more than Americans during the holiday season, Adobe’s research found, despite the absence of a Black Friday starting gun to ignite the shopping.
Tamara Gaffney, an analyst with Adobe, argues that the Black Friday custom tricks retailers into leaving money on the table and everyone would be better off detaching shopping from Thanksgiving altogether. ”Our official start date here called Black Friday, which will eventually be Thanksgiving, is preventing online sales from occurring,” she says.
The quirks of this year’s calendar make jumping past Thanksgiving even more tempting. Karen Hoguet, chief financial officer at Macy’s, recently told investors that the short holiday season has the company focused on getting people spending in November. ”There’s some people who are saying the six fewer days is negative, but I keep saying November, December hasn’t changed,” she said. “You still have the same number of people to buy gifts for.”
So will retailers just keep chipping away at the calendar until Black Friday shopping merges with trick or treating? Unlikely, says Sucharita Mulpuru, an analyst at Forrester. But the reason has less to do with economics and more with emotion.
“Black Friday is just a tradition in America. It’s as much the sport that people get up and wait in the dark,” she says. “I don’t think that will ever go away.”
