Here’s a controversial thought to kick things off:
Black Friday might be retail’s biggest tradition — and biggest trap.
Every year the same thing happens:
Retailers flood customers with messages, slash margins, and compete on volume instead of relevance…
all because everyone else is doing it.
And that’s what makes me wonder:
Is Black Friday actually meaningful for business — or is retail simply afraid to be the one not participating?
What retail says vs. what retail does
We love to say things like:
- Retail is detail
- Retail is all about data
- Retail is omnichannel
- Know your customer
All true. All good.
But during Black Friday?
Most retailers behave in ways that contradict their own principles:
Retail preaches: precision, relevance, personalisation.
Retail practices: volume, noise, mass-discounting.
That gap is growing — and increasingly hard to ignore.
My phone as a case study
As I’m writing this, I’ve received more than 20 Black Friday SMS messages.
My email inbox?
Hundreds.
And here’s the micro-example that pushed me over the edge:
Last year, one retailer sent me six Black Friday offers in a single day…
…on the exact product I had bought from them two weeks earlier.
If “knowing your customer” is the mantra, this is the opposite.
Do the deals even matter?
Here’s the uncomfortable truth:
Most Black Friday offers aren’t actually better than regular promotions — they’re just dressed in black and wrapped in urgency.
The data (directionally across the industry) tells the same story:
📉 Most Black Friday sales don’t increase total seasonal demand — they just shift it.
📉 Margins take a hit while revenue stays flat.
📉 Customer loyalty rarely increases from mass discounting.
It’s not growth.
It’s redistribution — and often expensive redistribution.
So why do we keep doing it?
Is Black Friday a carefully designed strategic lever?
Or is it a moving train that nobody dares to step off because:
- “What if everyone else steals my customers?”
- “What if we look absent?”
- “What if we miss out?”
But here’s the twist:
If every retailer is shouting the same message at the same time to the same customers…
are we really competing — or just adding noise?
What is retail actually about today?
Is it about loyalty, relevance, brand, experience?
Or is it just about checking the “Black Friday” box because that’s what we’ve always done?
Maybe Black Friday made sense once.
Maybe for some categories, it still does.
But for many, it’s starting to look less like strategy and more like inertia.
Which leads to a better question:
If Black Friday disappeared tomorrow, what would you replace it with?
And if you weren’t allowed to discount this week, how would you compete?
The retailers that can answer those questions have already stepped off the train.
Final thought
Maybe the bravest move in retail isn’t shouting louder —
it’s choosing when to stay quiet, get off the train everyone else is on and doing something different.
From AI to ROI 
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