You may have noticed from the emails flooding into your inbox (even in this post-GDPR world) that this Friday 23 November is “Black Friday”. The event, originating in the US, takes place the day after Thanksgiving and is now synonymous with heavy discounting by retailers, especially those online.

Less than a decade ago, this would have been an utterly unremarkable shopping day in the UK. The UK’s shoppers understood that, whilst the retailers were fiercely competing with each other to secure consumers’ spending in the run-up to Christmas, November and December were not months in which retailers would slash their prices as a means to generate sales. The UK public had to wait until Boxing Day for the retailers to cut prices in order to sell their excess Christmas stock, with the leading news story on Boxing Day often consisting of shoppers (both from the UK and overseas) flocking to the UK’s department stores to try to obtain the best bargains.

That changed with the increased adoption of Black Friday discounting by the UK’s retailers approximately five years ago, (although Amazon had offered UK consumers Black Friday deals from 2010). Black Friday firmly came on the UK’s radar in 2014, when the headlines featured shoppers at several UK supermarkets coming to blows in a bid to purchase heavily discounted televisions.

So what will be the effect of Black Friday on the retail sector in 2018, in the context of the current challenging market, with a number of well-known retailers releasing profit warnings and others proposing CVAs and/or entering administration? In recent years, Black Friday has undoubtedly had an impact on consumers’ shopping habits during the key trading period prior to Christmas, meaning that retailers have had to react.