Definitely not a serious issue but Black Friday this year is going to be weird. The past few years, I used to go to a local mall around 2 or 3 AM and hit up the Nike and Adidas and other clothing stores and just go to town. No crazy stories or people fighting but I'd find a lot of good stuff. It was a good time with either family or friends to just walk around and buy shit.
That same mall, during the quarantine, imposed limits on the number of people allowed in a store and even the larger store allowed about 20-30 people, max, at a time. I wonder if people will just forego waiting in lines for BF and if the mall will just be the "regular" length of lines that I've seen the past few months as a result.
More importantly, will retailers put better deals online or will they go the opposite direction and not offer as good deals because they've been hurting since March of this year. You'd think people's bank accounts are running lean right now and no one is out buying unnecessary shit but from what I've seen, at least on tech circles, is people are very much ready to spend $500+ on new consoles and $1000 of graphics cards. Even the auto industry is doing "OK" and they are still moving cars with ease.
Maybe Amazon's Prime Day next week will shed some more light, even if the deals aren't all that good and just end up being cheap Chinese shit no one buys. Other retailers, like Best Buy, Target, and Walmart also plan on having sales next week to compete with Amazon which makes me think that BF may not have as much importance to many retailers.
Prime Day got pushed back this year by a few months but it's still not ridiculous to see sales a month before BF as "pre-BF" sales. Those sales have been starting earlier and earlier in the past several years. What's really retarded is "Black Friday in July" sales. I'm not mad, though; I picked up a $400 Dyson vacuum for $120 last year July from Macy's lol. But if BF is a dud this year, either because of the poor deals or the lack of customers, I wonder if BF gets axed and retailers start to have "sales" similar to BF or Prime day at random times throughout the year in the future. Like Steam has, or used to have, Summer sales that people waited for.
I guess the Holidays will always be there and sales will always happen close to Christmas but speaking specifically about BF and its notoriety for people beating each other up in the middle of aisles of Walmart for a $59 BluRay player, that might come to an end if COVID forces social distancing at these events and people decide not to go or just the retailers are hurting so much that they can't afford to risk having a fire sale