Conventionally, the US consumers patiently wait for Black Friday deals prior to making their holiday shopping. Marketers associate Black Friday (the day after Thanksgiving) with the start of the Christmas shopping season that accounts for more than 20% of overall annual sales. On this day, retail stores set discounts on their items, and this way boost customer purchasing activity.

Statistical figures indicate that there were three million more shoppers in the US in 2013 compared to 2012 on Black Friday. Marketing analysts associated the growth with the improvement of household balance sheets while more people got employed.

Alongside with Black Friday, retail stores apply CyberMonday to offer discount deals and vastly sell online. According to ComScore, CyberMonday online sales reached a $1.46 billion in 2012 that made a 17 percent increase from the $1.25 billion in 2011, $1.02 billion in 2010, and $887 million in 2009. However, given the year-after-year increase of CyberMonday sales, they are still keeping behind the amount of Black Friday sales that showed a total spending amount of $59.1 billion in 2012, $52.5 billion in 2011, $45 billion in 2010, and $41.2 billion in 2009, respectively. Nonetheless, over the last five years, 40% of Black Friday shopping got onto popular online sites, including ‘Target’, ‘Best Buy’, and ‘Kohls’. The popularity of online shopping trend is growing, while 19% more shoppers expressed their desire to buy online on Black Friday.

Thus, retailers are emphasizing on a combined brick-and-mortar approach while boosting Black Friday sales. While going online, retailers consider the fact that 23% of shoppers prefer seeing a physical item prior to purchasing it. At that, almost 61% are unaware of what they are going to buy on Black Friday, and instead are just looking for discounts.