What’s the Story?

On November 26, 2021, the Coresight Research team undertook its annual tour of stores for Black Friday. We visited the stores of 35 different retailers in North America—in New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, New Jersey, and Vancouver, Canada. Our team covered outlets, luxury malls, downtown locations, neighborhood centers and regional malls. In this report, we offer our observations and insights on the brick-and-mortar channel during Black Friday 2021, covering the breadth and depth of promotions, product quantity and availability, consumer activity and demand, and more.

Why It Matters

Black Friday is so named because the high sales volume on the day after Thanksgiving pushes many retailers into the profitability zone (which is written with black digits) for the year, although Cyber Monday has surpassed Black Friday in online sales volume for several years now. Black Friday provides a meaningful indicator as to the strength of holiday sales, which is all the more important in the current retail environment, as consumers gradually return to physical stores to shop.

Black Friday Insights: Coresight Research Analysis

In Figure 1, we summarize our commentary and insights on promotional activity, inventory availability, the extent of crowds in the stores, and technology and other features that caught our team’s attention at the stores that our team visited on Black Friday. We present images from stores in the following section.

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Figure 1. Coresight Research Insights: Summary of Black Friday Store Visits [wpdatatable id=1491 table_view=regular]

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Source: Coresight Research Black Friday Store Observations Amazon

• Amazon transformed the space in its New York City bookstore in Midtown Manhattan, which had formerly housed a café, into an interactive space, promoting the new Wheel of Timefantasy TV series that recently launched on Prime Video. The space also promoted the series of novels on which the show is based.

[caption id="attachment_136933" align="aligncenter" width="540"] Source: Coresight Research[/caption]   Bath & Body Works

• Lines wrapped outside the front door in mall

[caption id="attachment_136934" align="aligncenter" width="640"] Source: Coresight Research[/caption]   Best Buy

• Plenty of TV inventory

[caption id="attachment_136935" align="aligncenter" width="640"] Source: Coresight Research[/caption]   Foot Locker

• Light stock

[caption id="attachment_136936" align="aligncenter" width="592"] Source: Coresight Research[/caption]   Nordstrom Rack

• Plenty of incoming inventory ready to be put on shelves

[caption id="attachment_136937" align="aligncenter" width="498"] Source: Coresight Research[/caption]   Target

• Cleaned-out shelves

[caption id="attachment_136938" align="aligncenter" width="639"] Source: Coresight Research[/caption]  

What We Think

Black-Friday store traffic varied widely by location, based on several headwinds and tailwinds. The tailwinds included pent-up demand from a highly vaccinated population with money to spend and consumer joy in the ability to enter public spaces again. The headwinds included the increasing appeal and convenience of online shopping, combined with the “holiday creep” bringing Black Friday deals earlier, as well as a large subset of the population not yet being comfortable with entering public spaces. On the whole, we are encouraged by several instances of crowded stores, cleaned-out shelves and shoppers exhausted in malls after a day of shopping until they drop; the holiday season is off to a solid start.