If it's never too early to start publicizing Black Friday promotions, then I guess it's never too early to write about the concept. On Monday, 11 weeks before Christmas, Amazon gleefully announced that customers "can shop early and save big with Black Friday-worthy deals available today." (I'll give myself a little credit for anticipating this in our April Fools' Day issue four years ago: "Amazon Starting Black Friday Sales on Good Friday") The onlne retailer did not mention global supply chain issues in its press release.
In the true retail spirit of the season, Amazon crowed about its holiday gift guides, Holiday Prep Shop and the new Holiday Gift List "to let customers share gift ideas for everyone in their household with relatives and friends, conveniently organized by recipient. For the first time ever, Prime members in the U.S. using the Amazon mobile shopping app can send gifts with just an e-mail or mobile phone number--no need to know the recipient's address."
Could this last option also be called a stalking stuffer? Alexa, can you say "bah, humbug"?
"Amazon is counting on Christmas coming early this year," Pamela N. Danziger wrote in Forbes. "It sorta tried last year when it moved Prime Day from July to October 13 and 14, hoping to kick off early holiday shopping, though it was only tangentially positioned around the coming holiday season. But this year it is going full-tilt into the holiday gifting season early by stretching Black Friday from a single day--the Friday after Thanksgiving--to a two-month sales event."
Coincidentally, on the same day Amazon pulled the plug on whatever shreds were left of Black Friday as we once knew (and hated/loved) it, my wife and I were driving back to upstate New York from a wedding we had attended in Bethlehem, Pa., aka Christmas City. On the N.Y. State Thruway I was struck by a memory. Almost 15 years ago, on the morning after a Thanksgiving spent with friends in New Jersey, we were rushing north on the same highway because I was scheduled to work the Black Friday late shift at the Northshire Bookstore.
I'd allotted plenty of travel time, but suddenly, inexplicably, we were stuck in what felt like a three-lane parking lot and the mystery wasn't solved for an hour. Eventually, nearing an exit just south of the toll booths, we spotted the gridlock culprit: Woodbury Common Premium Outlets. Black Friday had officially begun, and I was still hours from home. By the time I finally reached the bookstore sales floor that afternoon, the frenzied book buyers were a nice change of pace, walking much faster than I'd been driving.
This past Monday, however, I wasn't in a rush to get home. There were no lines--or toll booths--near that exit. Black Friday was weeks away and of little consequence to me; I'm an Indies First/Small Business Saturday guy now.
Once upon a time, though...
I went through my first Black Friday bookstore frenzy in 1992, before Amazon or online sales even existed. More than a decade later, in 2004, I could still write a bookseller's blog post that began: "Is anybody ever ready for Black Friday? Ready is not the word. It's more a kind of constructive paranoia--generously mixed with terror--that propels us to take every precaution we can think of to insure success. The bean counters upstairs will hold their breath because so much is riding on this day and so many things can go wrong. They can't prepare. They can only add up the damage afterward."
A couple of years after that, I wrote in Shelf Awareness that on a national scale, Black Friday is always what it pretends to be in its spectacular influence on consumer behavior. It also happens just a day after the annual debut of Santa Claus in Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. Retail-inspired myths are the best, aren't they?
Since then, Amazon and its biggest competitors have been gradually devaluing the Black Friday experience, if such a thing is possible. So maybe the fact that we continue to expand timeframe exponentially (Remember when people used to say, "Wouldn't it be nice if the Christmas spirit lasted all year long?" Like that, only much worse.) is just the natural devolution of an unnatural "holiday." In 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic effectively put a lockdown on any remnants of the traditional "mad rush through the doors" Black Friday early morning festivities. It's just different now.
As everyone knows, in 1897 eight-year-old Virginia O'Hanlon wrote a letter to The Sun. She was deeply concerned that some of her friends were saying there's no Santa Claus. Her father, in an odd bit of paternal logic, offered reassurance of sorts: "If you see it in The Sun it's so." She asked the editor: "Please tell me the truth; is there a Santa Claus?" Francis Pharcellus Church's response has since become the most reprinted newspaper editorial in history.
Though Black Friday doesn't lend itself to sentimentality, there's a moment every year when I recall the pure adrenaline rush of being a bookseller on that one day each year, as it used to be. Yes, Virginia, there once was a Black Friday, and it was only 24 hours long, no matter what Amazon tells you now.