Black Friday: Now a Greater Risk Than Reward?

Three years ago, eBay did something that would fundamentally shake up the world of retailing as we knew it, and the fallout from that deed is becoming more visible.

It got together with BlissWorld spa, and offered up free manicures, pedicures and foot massages to those willing to come in, book an appointment, and try out the eBay Mobile system to do their Black Friday shopping. Three years later, and the landscape has changed once more. Now, retailers and shoppers alike are starting to wonder if Black Friday is worth it after all.

What eBay’s move did was to turn one of the most hair-raising shopping days of the year into a relaxing experience thanks to mobile payments. While those pampered shoppers did miss out on some deals, eBay didn’t stint on that front either, offering up a slate of mobile-only deals that weren’t even available to those valiant Black Friday shoppers.

With online and mobile shopping on a steady rise—most of my own Christmas shopping was done on Amazon last year, with a few exceptions bought far enough in advance that Black Friday didn’t even factor into things—many are asking what the point of Black Friday even is any more.

Black Friday often left some with a bad taste in their mouth from the word go, particularly as the day started an expansion into Thanksgiving itself. Putting a day designed to celebrate family togetherness, gratitude for blessings and the like next to a day designed to celebrate greed, excess and occasional violence didn’t work out so well for some. Now, some retailers are looking to get out completely.

DSW, for example, noted its stores would be closed on Thanksgiving Day altogether, no longer the standard it once was. REI stepped things up further, not only closing for Thanksgiving Day, but also for Black Friday. With attendance down—one report says that those showing up for Black Friday dropped from 45 million in 2013 to 25.6 million in 2014—it’s easy to see why some retailers are interested in folding up.

Granted, Black Friday is still big business. The four-day weekend accounted for about $50.9 million in sales, and that was with attendance down. That cash often comes with a price: a sock in the image. A website known as blackfridaydeathcount.com tracks deaths and injuries that occur during the event, and with Black Friday spilling into Thanksgiving, the end result can be problematic. No store wants to be known as “the store where that guy got trampled trying to buy a new television.”

Even the Black Friday Death Count site notes with a kind of sarcastic glee: “Not affiliated with a certain site, with a strikingly similar layout, touting Cyber Monday death counts. Spoiler: there aren’t any!”

People are coming around. With mobile payments and mobile shopping options becoming easier and more pervasive with each passing year, and stores pushing deals back from Black Friday to encompass most of November, the idea of Black Friday just doesn’t mean so much any more. Granted, the Friday after Thanksgiving is a shopping opportunity like nobody’s business.

Many have the day off, and Thanksgiving is actually over, so why not open the stores up a little early and offer some special deals to get the shoppers in the door? But like so much of life, too much of anything can be distasteful.

We’ll likely see Black Friday go on in one form or another for some time. It might, however, be less a time for door-busting spectaculars and more a time for simple, small-scale deals conducted during normal business hours. If it even shows up at all.