Is Black Friday dead? Not according to the data

New insights from the annual survey released by the National Retail Federation and Prosper Insights & Analytics, which we picked up from a recent Delaware State Chamber newsletter, are especially compelling if you’ve been hearing declarations that “Black Friday is dead.” In actuality, Black Friday 2023 was the biggest on record, with 200.4 million consumers shopping from Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday.

In 2017, that number was 174.6 million shoppers. That year, Target’s Black Friday sale started at 6 p.m. on Thanksgiving Day, reflecting a trend of opening the doors hours before the “traditional” midnight rush. Mercifully, that trend has reversed, allowing most retail workers the day off on Thanksgiving.

By 2019, at the time a record-breaker with 189.6 million shoppers, Black Friday had come to mean shopping on Amazon through the whole long weekend — and no waiting in line for hours to fistfight over the last 40” TV. The pandemic saw a slight drop in 2020 and 2021, but nothing near Black Friday’s recent low of 2018 (165.8 million). The figures swung higher than ever last year with 196.7 million shoppers before breaking 200 mil this year.

(Courtesy National Retail Federation)

On which day did the highest amount of this shopping take place? Despite online shopping being more popular than in-store, Black Friday has the most shoppers, with 90.6 million vs. 73.1 million on Cyber Monday. The only day where in-person shopping was (slightly) more popular than online shopping? Saturday. And while it’s doubtful that nearly 60 million people were skipping the big box stores for small businesses on Small Business Saturday, that’s a big Small Business Saturday.