Does Black Friday even matter anymore?

If you too have been tempted in the past by the idea of a 10% discount in exchange for subscribing to a newsletter, this time of year can become particularly stressful for your email inbox. As punctual as ever, Black Friday emails have now become a routine for anyone regularly shopping online, ready to bombard us with more or less enticing discounts. While those shouted percentages may be tempting at first, what is now evident is that Black Friday is no longer what it used to be. "Just a few years ago, missing out on Black Friday became a cause for anxiety and concern," commented the PwC agency in 2019. "Now it resembles more of a symbolic moment than a truly influential one in our purchases." In the first Black Friday since the end of pandemic restrictions, retailers saw a perfect pre-Christmas launch towards a hoped-for increase in sales, relying largely on the shopping desire of those who had been confined to their homes for over a year. But does Black Friday still matter in 2023, except for the purchase of basic necessities?

At the end of the pandemic, the prospect of the first Christmas with family had led to an unexpected revenge shopping, something that many online retailers had anticipated: according to Salesforce, online discounts on Black Friday in 2021 were 16% lower than the previous year, while prices had risen by 12%. Fueled by the anxiety of not receiving their gifts on time, many had started their Christmas shopping early, unexpectedly accelerating what had become a passive appointment with shopping. Despite encouraging numbers tainted by the pandemic, in recent years, Black Friday has been swallowed by the vortex of perpetual online discounts, transitioning from the status of "unmissable moment" to that moment of transition where we passively look at the offerings of our favorite retailer in the hope of finding something minimally enticing. Against the post-Covid trend, in 2023, the discounts of the last Friday of November started early, increasing, according to Adobe Analytics, with an average of 25% on clothing compared to 19% last year.

In a world of 24/7 online shopping, where discounts and promotions are now the order of the day, the power of Black Friday has disappeared in the need to clear warehouses, in what has now become a marathon starting in early October and culminating in Cyber Monday, a Christmas slide leading directly to the first sales of the year. In the era of conscious fashion, Black Friday seems almost anachronistic, an old shopping dinosaur from which many brands are progressively distancing themselves by choosing totally different approaches. For several years, brands like Noah have chosen to close their online stores as a protest during Black Friday, or, as famously done by Patagonia, they encourage customers not to buy through anti-shopping graphics ("Thank you for not shopping"). While buying habits seem to increasingly favor vintage, Black Friday, summarized in hilarious videos of clumsy Americans losing dignity to grab a heavily discounted TV, is now a distant memory, erased from our minds by a vacuum cleaner you glimpsed on Amazon.