It wasn’t enough for the retail industry to hype Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Gray Thursday, Giving Tuesday and Small Business Saturday.
Now Walmart is trying to lead a charge to add Sunday to the mix by encouraging consumers to shop a day earlier and create a new “Cyber Sunday.”
Experts say the push by retailers to create more and more shopping “events” is creating an overlap that makes traditional shopping days such as Black Friday less meaningful.
“We do our shopping gradually, when time permits,” Danielle Sosebee, of Cleveland, said Tuesday as she checked out sales at the Mall of Georgia along with her husband Justin and children Layla, 4, and Luke, 7.
“We never do Black Friday. We spend that time decorating for Christmas.”
Black Friday — for decades the unofficial start of the shopping season — is being undermined by sales that start as early as late October and by a move from retailers to rely less on one-day “doorbusters” by offering price discounts that last through Christmas.
A lot is at stake as retailers fight tight wallets and online competition. Holiday spending is expected to reach $630 billion this year, up 3.5 percent over 2014, according to the National Retail Federation.
But pay stagnation has made American consumers cautious, even as the economy has shown improvement and the national jobless rate has fallen to 5 percent.
In 2015, median household income adjusted for inflation is expected to be 4.6 percent below its 2007 level, said Chris Christopher, a retail analyst with IHS Global Insight.
What’s more, the effort to add more shopping “events” is not growing the numbers of shoppers, experts said. Rather it is spreading the same pool out into different parts of the holiday season.
Dani Cushion, chief marketing officer of data analysis firm Cardlytics, said Black Friday is still pretty significant, bringing in as much as 30 percent of holiday revenue the week prior, the week of, and the week after Black Friday.
“However, it’s not the only time frame that matters,” she said. “The spend has flattened out a bit, particularly with shoppers buying gifts later than before.
“Smart retailers will start their marketing prior to Black Friday and continue it all the way up to Christmas to ensure they don’t miss reaching any of the various types of holiday shoppers,” she said.
Christopher said in a research note that a challenge for the industry is excess inventory that built up in the third quarter of the year, especially in September, and has put pressure on many retailers to speed up holiday discounting to clear the backlog.
But he added that retailers have also trained consumers to sit and wait for the best deal, affecting deals in other parts of the year.
Jabari Bunch, 25, of Stone Mountain, said he prefers shopping at brick-and-mortar stores. Bunch, who works for retail giant Gap, said online is too impersonal and cold for his tastes.
But his friends Angela Dundas and Imani Chapman, 22, both of Snellville, said they tried shopping Black Friday last year, but were overwhelmed by the crowds. They plan to focus more on online this year.
“Personally I don’t like the crowds, but I love the deals,” said Dundas.
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