The strategic advantage of Black Friday?
Simply joining the crowd is not a very shrewd way of trying to outperform the category.
Black Friday in South Africa has been a thing for about 13 years now.
Unlike the early days, Takealot now thankfully manages to keep their site operational on the day, and almost every retailer now runs 'specials' on the day (or some choose to claim the entire month of November as 'their special moment').
It's safe to proclaim that Black Friday is now a big thing in South Africa.
But the strategic advantage that Black Friday presents to retailers is sadly non-existent.
When all of your category competitors are discounting in order to either clear stock or capture customer data - is the excessive pressure that you are willingly putting your operations team under really worth the resource expense required to simply participate?
Obviously not.
When discounts are a commodity that are available everywhere, the competition for zero-margin share of wallet intensifies exponentially. Purposefully fighting for scraps should not be on the roster for confident, brand-forward businesses.
In addition, extra money needs to be spent on logistics, marketing, extra store- and warehouse staff (all of which also has the effect of taking focus away from Christmas); and all of this for the tantalising reward of zero net profit.
Statistics show that the result is that general Christmas retail trade in South Africa is largely pulled forward into November.
Retailers in South Africa do Black Friday because they don't want to be the odd one out.
Joining in means that everyone is participating and contributing to the festivities, but simply playing the game is not the point - winning is the point - so doing Black Friday is not a very shrewd way of trying to outperform the category.
The turnover generated by a sale might look impressive, but it masks the fact that a clearance was necessary in the first place and doesn't show what kind of profit was generated from the sale of marked down stock that needed additional expenses to generate interest and efficient conversion from buyers.
What's more - the full story of stock returns after Black Friday has passed, isn't disclosed by most retailers; and again this is a distracting nuisance at a time when stores should be applying all of their energy into the Christmas trade.
Black Friday is a terrible idea - no matter how you slice and dice it - and the fact that retailers subject themselves to this kind of madness also tells you something about where their strategic thinking is at.
The customer might win a nice deal or two, but it's practically impossible to see how this adopted occasion offers any kind of strategic edge to retailers.