The ready online availability of products and prices traditionally reserved for in-store shoppers was expected to drive down retail foot traffic by around 20 percent across the U.S., said Greg Maloney, president and CEO of the Americas retail business at real estate services firm JLL. “Everything we heard from those that reported earnings recently, everybody talked about November being off to a very good start.” I think they had their promotional cadence set long ago,” Feldman said. “This spring, it felt a little further away, but now it’s hitting really close to home,” she said. Heil, 23, said she and her immediate family recently had a Covid-19 exposure scare, and even after testing negative and getting a clean bill of health, she was reluctant to venture out on unnecessary shopping trips. “Usually for Black Friday, my family and I or my partner and I go to the mall or we go to any of the local shops around us like TJ Maxx, or shop at some of the local outdoor malls, but we won’t be doing that this year,” said the Pennsylvania resident. “I think a lot of people are going to skip going out in person this year,” Dunn said.Īpril Heil is one of those shoppers. but they were in and out quickly,” one Facebook user wrote, adding that they only saw about 20 cars in the store’s parking lot when they visited. “I went in to our local Effingham, Illinois, Walmart around 6:20 this morning and it was DEAD!! They said there had been around 80 people in line at 5 a.m. People are really craving celebration and connection, and we can’t see each other, so we kind of fall back on 'buying stuff.'īut scenes like that appeared to be the exception rather than the rule. “People are really craving celebration and connection, and we can’t see each other, so we kind of fall back on. “There’s a return to buying things, versus these several years of consumers being just focused on experiences,” she said. Retailers didn’t want to create a frenzy.”īlack Friday also is getting a boost from the broader shift in consumption patterns, said Lizabeth Dunn, operating partner at Consumer Growth Partners. “There’s definitely a pretty clear feeling that you don't need to be out today,” Joseph Feldman, senior managing director at Telsey Advisory Group. The pandemic also seems to have killed off the contentious practice of opening stores on Thanksgiving Day itself, with most major retail chains announcing 5 a.m. This year, stores started promoting holiday sales as far back as October, and made “Black Friday” sale prices available well in advance of the Thanksgiving holiday, while Amazon switched its Prime Day shopping event from July to October. The concept of Black Friday as a singular day was already on the wane for several years prior to the coronavirus pandemic: The proliferation of online shopping, combined with retailers’ desire to avoid the bad press that inevitably followed clips of brawling customers tussling over TVs, had led to a dilution of the extreme-sports nature of the day, although more than half of all the people in the country - some 165 million - were expected to hit the stores over the course of the long weekend in 2019.

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