Walmart strikers in Duarte, California, on Black Friday 2012.
Last year, following petitions, protests, and scattered strikes against Walmart and other big box stores opening on Thanksgiving, Zeynep Ton, a professor of operations management at MIT, asked "Who actually benefits from this craziness" of holiday openings. It's obvious that workers get the shaft, extra pay aside. But Ton also
threw some cold water on the idea that "Gray Thursday" provides big benefits for
anyone:
Retailers get a temporary sales lift from offering deep discounts. But opening stores on a holiday often means they pay employees time and a half. And it’s unlikely that opening stores earlier makes people spend more for holiday shopping; they just spend more that day and less on other days.
What about customers? Ten dollars off on Thursday is pretty much the same as $10 off on Friday. Anyway, you can get a lot of the same deals online. And really, how good a bargain is Gray Thursday at the cost of ever less time with your family when family time is already being whittled away in so many other ways?
Ton isn't alone in throwing cold water on the Thanksgiving/Black Friday frenzy. There are roughly a million articles a year pointing out that few shoppers will get the really big discounts, and many of the other discounts are available at other times of year. And Richard Feinberg, a Purdue University professor of consumer science and retailing, tells Marketplace that
Black Friday isn't the top sales day of the year:
"It has not been the busiest shopping day of the year for many years. It is certainly busy. It is usually in the top five of revenue days, but it hasn't been the top revenue day in quite a long time. Usually that day occurs on the Saturday before Christmas," says Feinberg.
Also:
Tamara Gaffney, an analyst with Adobe, argues that the Black Friday custom tricks retailers into leaving money on the table and that everyone would be better off detaching shopping from Thanksgiving. “Our official start date here called Black Friday, which will eventually be Thanksgiving, is preventing online sales from occurring,” she says.
Finally,
don't believe what the retailers tell you about Black Friday sales. The National Retail Federation usually releases early estimates of spending over the weekend that are ridiculously overblown, those estimates are widely repeated, and nobody notices when, months later, real data comes out that shows spending wasn't the "record" the NRF claimed.