Black Friday: a term used to describe the day that millions of Americans flock to the stores the day after Thanksgiving
to get the best deals for their holiday shopping. This year’s Black Friday however wasn’t as crowded as previous years. “Black Friday just a day this year, no longer a bellwether” is an article that describes how Black Friday 2015 differs from Black Friday in prior years. The article that was published in the New York Times on November 29th was written by Hiroko Tabuchi. Ms. Tabuchi is a writer for The New York Times that mainly focuses on business and technology from Tokyo and Japanese economics. Ms. Tabuchi has been with The New York Times since 2008. She previously worked for The Wall Street Journal and was a reporter for the Tokyo bureau of The Associated Press. The article expresses that technology is the major factor in the shift of Black Friday this year. More people shopped online over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend instead of actually going to stores. In a survey by the National Retail Federation, nearly 102 million people stated that they shopped in stores over the weekend compared to more than 103 million who shopped online. Consumers also planned on spending approximately $80 less this year than last year, during the holiday weekend, $381 in 2014 compared to $300 in 2015. According to data from Adobe, shoppers spent about $7.2 billion online on Thanksgiving and Black Friday and mobile devices making up a third of how those purchases were made.
Another factor is the longevity of the sales. Before you could only get sales on Black Friday, but now stores start the sales on Thanksgiving and they last throughout the entire weekend. This gives less enthusiasm to wake up in the wee hours of the morning on Black Friday and just go either Thursday night or even on
