Black Friday 2021: what to expect in sales in another pandemic year

(CNN Spanish) – Black Friday 2021 is just a few months away and yes, it is likely that after the Amazon Prime Day session last month, you have been craving more than one discounted product and are looking forward to the end of the year discounts .

The first thing to know is that this year’s Black Friday is celebrated on November 26, in a time that is known as the biggest shopping weekend, right on Thanksgiving.

Black Friday, which began in the 1950s in Philadelphia, continues more than seven decades later, with shoppers taking advantage of great deals, becoming days when retailers began opening their stores very early. Even in 2011, Walmart extended the business day again when it opened its stores at 10 p.m. on Thanksgiving night and stayed open until Black Friday.

Online deals often arrive before Black Friday as well. In fact, you can expect big price drops on the most sought-after items at major retailers days before the day, and continuing through Cyber ​​Monday, which this year falls on November 29.

For this 2021, promotions and offers are expected to start earlier, like 2020, says the Black Friday page, with “many of the retail stores offering weeks or even months of deals” before that day.

The impact of the pandemic on Black Friday 2021

In 2020, due to the covid-19 pandemic, a different event was seen than what had been seen before, with stores even mixing opening hours both on Thanksgiving Day and advance sales, and a hybrid model of physical stores and internet sales, says the Black Friday page.

“What 2021 holds remains to be seen, and it depends on the state of the pandemic,” says the Black Friday page. “Like shoppers, we’re curious to see if the 2020 retail experience translates into a return to tradition, or if the experimental 2020-style Black Friday format is here to stay.” says the page.

However, experts say, Black Friday promotions are expected to start even late October and even early November.

Plus, experts say, Thanksgiving is expected to give November 26, 2021 shopping a boost.

And no, it wasn’t just the pandemic that boosted online sales on Black Friday.

“In fact, in 2019, without a pandemic, more Americans shopped online over Thanksgiving weekend than in brick-and-mortar stores, according to the National Retail Federation. And Black Friday’s online sales figures have taken a hit. upward trend since 2016, “says the Black Friday page.

More sales expected

In 2020 the unemployment figure reached 8%, and consumption only rose by 0.3% at the end of the year. Added to this were restrictions due to the pandemic in many cities, which made consumers prefer online sales than in face-to-face stores, Julio Sevilla, a business professor at the University of Georgia, told CNN Dinero.

But despite this, year-end sales grew by 8.3% in 2020 compared to the same period in 2019, according to the National Retail Federation (NRF for its acronym in English), with sales of $ 789.4 billion, “exceeding the forecast” of the NRF “despite the economic challenges of the coronavirus pandemic.

In 2019 sales were US $ 729.1 billion in the November and December season, according to the NRF.

And for 2021, a “strong appetite” for purchases is expected on the so-called Black Friday, because according to a poll cited by Black Friday, “Buyers are looking for value and bargains, but they do not plan to decrease their expenses as the pandemic subsides.”

And Amazon Prime Day, another popular day of discounts, could give a glimpse of what to expect by the end of the year. According to Adobe Analytics, in 2020, online deals that take place in November reached $ 10.9 billion in what would have been the biggest shopping day of 2020. But in 2021, the global retail giant said which offered some two million products. And according to analysts, these offers can generate sales for Amazon in the United States for about US $ 11,000 million.

The figure would represent about 4% of the sales that the company made last year for US $ 236,282 million in the United States.