Retail Institute’s recap of Black Friday 2018

Black Friday is an informal name given to the last Friday of November immediately after Thanksgiving in the USA, Canada and the UK. In the North America, it is considered to be the day of the biggest sales and discounts and, therefore, for many years, it has been associated with the beginning of Christmas shopping season. In Poland, it became better known in 2016 and has been slowly gaining on popularity ever since.

“The footfall in 130 shopping centers during the week of the Black Friday campaign, i.e. between 19 and 25 November 2018, increased by 13.8% compared to the same period in 2016 and by 8.9% compared to the 2017 results. It means that this year’s Black Friday sales have attracted 1.1 million customers more than in 2016. The biggest gainers are very large shopping centers (more than 40,000 m2 of leasable space) with their footfall increasing by 22.9% and shopping centers whose offer focuses on fashion and services (+16.5%). Surprisingly, this year’s footfall in medium and small centers has dropped by 3.5%. RI experts preliminarily estimate that the turnover in the analyzed period (Friday-Sunday) was twice as high as the weekend before,” concluded Anna Szmeja, President of Retail Institute.

RI experts believe that in the years to come Polish Black Friday will develop its unique, local character. Already this year, Black Friday has sometimes evolved into “Black Week” or “Black Weekend”. Many businesses opened sales before 23 November and extended them over the week that followed, which on itself started with sales campaigns of online retailers known as “Cyber Monday”. Unlike in the North America and the majority of European countries, where Black Friday campaigns target selected range of products and are organized to sell their stock and slow-moving inventories, Polish sales typically covered all products and amounted to 30-50% discounts in case of fashion and 20% in the beauty and health sector.