Black Friday: The Disease
Like lemmings stampeding to the edge of the abyss, most of the legacy retailers in the US have yet again done themselves in on a day that once signified the color of their P&L turning from red to black. No more. Black Friday – The Disease has struck.
Black Friday was once a powerful and effective merchandising and marketing technique used to kick off a retailer’s holiday selling season. A small handful of items, carefully selected, sourced, and heavily committed to and incredibly priced, were made available at early morning store openings on the day after Thanksgiving. The strategy was built on the view that, if you owned that day’s early morning traffic, you would own the day. And then you could command the patronage of your customers for the following 4 or 5 weeks.
I teach a Retailing Leadership course at Columbia’s Business School. I remarked to my class last year, that, “since 2014’s Black Friday pricing seemed to have been revealed at Halloween rather than the day after Thanksgiving, 2015’s Black Friday pricing might show up on the Friday after Labor Day.” It turns out I was right.
Having spent over 30 years in this business and having actively participated in this Black Friday drama in almost every one of those years, and, having authored some of the ideas that made Black Friday successful, I feel comfortable playing critic.
In the past Black Friday merchandising and marketing strategies worked beautifully for those who executed those strategies well. But then merchandise mediocrity and copycat marketing set in. An incredible item became dozens of items, then ‘entire stocks.’ And store openings moved up earlier and earlier, ending up finally on Thanksgiving Day itself. As for pricing, those incredible deals became available earlier and earlier in the season. With this came the now ubiquitous retail malaise that plagues early December.
I would have thought that smarter minds would have prevailed this year, especially in light of the ongoing upward trend in Internet shopping. I would have thought that most stores that migrated into Thanksgiving Day openings would have retrenched and that truly great merchandise values would have reappeared. It didn’t happen. What we’ve witnessed is more of the same, same old, same old, with an added whiff of desperation in the form of even more unrestrained and unrestricted promotion behavior.
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Am I advocating a Ron Johnson/JC Penney style suicidal, and imbecilic withdrawal from deals and discounts? No, of course not. Today’s consumer is not interested in being retrained or restrained. I am suggesting, however, that only a fool will replay Holiday 2015 again this year. Einstein’s definition of insanity does still hold, notably, “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different outcomes.”
Yes, more normal fall weather and a more reasonable US dollar will make everyone look like a winner this year, but not if Holiday 2015’s playbook repeats itself. We need to be mindful of the fact that retail was weak virtually everywhere, not just in cold weather and tourist markets.
‘Oh Mama Can This Really Be The End, To Be Stuck Inside Of Retail With Those Black Friday Blues Again’ kind of sums up Holiday 2015 at retail. Those of us of a certain age know that I’ve taken some creative license with Bob Dylan’s famous song, ‘Stuck Inside Of Mobile With Those Memphis Blues Again’. This past season certainly has felt like ‘the end’ for many retailers afflicted with Black Friday: The Disease, but that doesn’t have to be the case. Please read my next blog: Black Friday: The Cure, for a handful of hopeful remedies.
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