Article

Why Some Shoppers are Opting Out of Black Friday This Year (2015)

We scoured our database of shopping trips from our consumer panel of over 300,000 Americans to isolate people who shopped on Black Friday in 2014 but failed to make any Black Friday trips in 2015. While this group of “defectors” may have had the patience last year, over 40% decided the crowds and lines were just too much this year.

Why-stayed

We also looked at which retailers these Black Friday defectors felt compelled to shop last year to understand who’s losing out on their Black Friday $’s in 2015 and found out that Walmart, Target, Costco and Sam’s Club lost the most and may be responsible for the negative shopping experiences that drove them to sit on the sidelines this year.

So, this begs the question. If they’re not shopping on Black Friday, when do they plan on doing their holiday shopping? It turns out about half plan to do more online gift buying than last year, and specifically, 32% are looking forward to shopping online tomorrow during Cyber Monday.

Defectors

Plans

Plans2

Here at Numerator, we’ll continue to monitor on and offline shopping trips throughout the season, but the early signal is clear. Black Friday’s importance continues to wane as the holiday deal landscape becomes more fragmented and digital.

About the Data

These insights were powered by Numerator’s ability to trigger real-time surveys based on observed shopping behavior. The data in this article was sourced from a survey completed by 101 of our 300,000 active panelists, triggered on Saturday, 11/28/2015 to shoppers who made Black Friday purchases in 2014 but did not shop on Black Friday 2015 (11/27/2015).

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