Why Are There Black Friday Sales on Thursday?

Early openings on Black Friday are an example of a manmade cycle. Opening on Thanksgiving night and calling it early Black Friday just made the cycle worse. And the retailers did it to themselves.

The problem with the idea to open earlier than the other retailers, is that it's not an exclusive idea. Other retailers soon met and then beat the opening time. It went from regular opening hours at 9 to opening at 7. Then opening at 6, followed by opening at 5. To opening at 6 PM on Thursday and calling it Friday. And then opening at 4 in the afternoon on Thursday. When does it end?

Why not just start Black Friday on Monday? It is a manmade cycle that has no lasting benefit for either the first mover or any other mover.

In 2021, none of the major retailers were open, in a physical retail setting, on Thanksgiving day. The change came from a shortage of labor and a shortage of product. The earlier bird cycle was broken but not by design.

Years ago, when I was a regional sales manager with a few dozen distributors spread from Maine to Chicago, the president of the company said that sales were down for the month, which was also the end of the quarter, and said that we should get on the phones and see about drumming up some orders.

And we did. We "saved" the month and quarter.

About the 15th of the next month, our sales were a more than a bit light, so we were again asked to call and bring in some orders. We were also allowed to give some extra discounts to get a few more orders. And we did. Guess what happened the month after that? About the 15th we were really light again.

You might be guessing at this point where I am going. We created our own cycle that was hurting production and affecting our profit because of the swings during the month.

Our distributors were way ahead of us. They figured if they held the orders to the end of the month, they thought they would help us look good because we got an order out of them, and possibly get a few extra points of profit.

It started out innocently enough. Get a few orders to pick things up. The problem was that we just moved the buying forward without actually creating "new" business and losing a few points of gross profit in the process.

We moved from a slow steady growth to a swinging sales cycle and it was our own doing. So we had to break our own cycle. We knew what was happening, but apparently the Harvard MBA president didn't. We had to convince him to stop bugging us about orders. That the next month was going to be bad because we pulled everything forward that we could and just let us do our job.

Our prediction proved correct. The next month was indeed bad. But from then on, we just worked our network as we normally would and we evened out sales while getting back some of the profit we were giving away.

Trying to break a cycle first requires understanding why the cycle is taking place. Go back, look for trends. In our case it wasn't the economy or the weather or housing starts. It was us. And it might be you.