Despite Asda - one of the UK's Black Friday pioneers - stepping back from the Black Friday initiative, plenty of other retailers like Tesco, Sainsbury's, John Lewis and Dixons remained committed to repeating Black Friday this year.
Last year, some UK retailers suffered knocks in a reputational sense thanks to US-style incidents of crowd disorder and squabbling over items, according to Bryan Roberts, senior vice-president & knowledge officer, EMEA, at Kantar Retail. "Thanks to social media, these incidents can rapidly snowball into unwelcome media stories."
However, Asda's retreat might have encouraged other retailers, who had already planned for and bought for 2015, to scale back on Black Friday's weekend offers, he believes.
"While the event undoubtedly boosts physical footfall into participating stores and web traffic to participating websites, there are a variety of drawbacks that make Black Friday something of a double-edged sword for UK retailers."
One major drawback is the lack of cultural relevance: Thanksgiving does not exist in the UK and Black Friday has been introduced into the UK market as an entirely random happening.
"While there are signs that the event is gaining traction among shoppers, it is still something of a quirky invasive species."
Some retailers admit that Black Friday categorically results in incremental sales, according to Roberts, but there is plenty of evidence, anecdotal if nothing else, that "a great deal of Black Friday spending is deferred or brought forward with bargain-hungry shoppers using Black Friday as a chance to save on an item that they would have bought anyway".
There are also two schools of thought on profitability. "Some retailers work hard with suppliers to buy specifically with Black Friday in mind, generating decent margins on high-volume lines that might not be sold during the rest of the year. Other retailers simply hoist Black Friday banners above existing stock or react to other retailers' Black Friday promotions."
For the former group of retailers, Black Friday can be a profitable exercise. For the latter group, it is clearly dilutive, Roberts said.
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