No sooner had the UK embraced Black Friday than the American holiday shopping tradition looks to be on its way out.
Asda, the British supermarket which imported the event from US parent Wal-Mart in 2013, said Tuesday that it won’t participate this time around. Instead of having customers line up all night for a limited number of heavily discounted items such as flat-screen televisions, Asda plans to reduce prices by £26 million across the season.
Asda’s move illustrates how UK retailers are backing away from a quintessentially American custom, only two years after adopting it. Black Friday events last year saw customers fighting in the aisles, while retailers’ websites crashed after being unable to cope with demand. Store chains including John Lewis and Argos have recently expressed misgivings about such events. US retailers are also showing restraint: Discounters Wal-Mart and Target will spread out deals over a longer period.
Last year’s Black Friday “damaged Christmas gift spending and it took sales away from full-priced sales over the Christmas period,” said Richard Perks, director of retail research at Mintel. “We think UK retailers will concentrate on damage limitation from now on, though it is clear that no one feels that they can really ignore Black Friday.”
Asda said its decision reflects “shopper fatigue setting in around flash sales on big-ticket, non-essential items at Christmas.” The supermarket gathered feedback from shoppers and found that they would prefer offers on items across the holiday season, rather than the “hustle and bustle” of a single-day sale event.
“Customers have told us loud and clear that they don’t want to be held hostage to a day or two of sales,” Asda Chief Executive Officer Andy Clarke said in a statement.
Clarke isn’t alone in his thoughts. Earlier this year, John Lewis Managing Director Andy Street said it was “collective madness” that retailers “line up to give our product away” four weeks before Christmas. Home Retail, the owner of Argos chain, said 21 October that a repeat of last year’s “almost unnatural” level of Black Friday orders and heavy discounting may cause difficulties.
Mintel estimates that total UK retail sales will grow 2.5 per cent to £42 billion in December. As many as one in 10 Britons who bought Christmas gifts last year did so on Black Friday and Mintel estimates that the occasion boosted November’s sales in 2014 by £400 million, 50 million pounds of which were online.
News by Bloomberg, edited by ESM. To subscribe to ESM: The European Supermarket Magazine, click here.
