CLEVELAND — It’s one of the busiest shopping days of the year, and Black Friday is upon us. But does the day still live up to its name?
A trip down memory lane reminds us how stores took months to prepare and how crowds flocked malls for the perfect gift, whether it was the clearance jacket or a new Macintosh with a CD-ROM drive.
"It’s madness. I don’t know why I’m even here. I should’ve stayed home," said one shopper to our cameras in 1992.
By the late 2000s and early 2010s, stores still dealt with shoppers camping outside days in advance and lines wrapped around the building. Some stores even opened early on Thanksgiving and stayed open throughout the night.
"We’ve been shopping since 6 p.m. last night [Thanksgiving], and we’re still going strong," said two shoppers to our cameras in 2013.
But then, the rise of online shopping, fueled by free shipping and the pandemic took over, leaving the in-store Black Friday saga as a distant memory.
Cleveland State University marketing professor Alex Sukhoy isn’t quick to kill the idea of Black Friday but admits it’s not just Friday anymore.
"We just have more options, not just in terms of the retailers of where we shop, but also how we shop even at the retailers that we know," she explained. "Today, instead of having that one major spike that day, it's a little bit more spread out."
Sukhoy vividly remembers working in retail during the 80's and 90's.
"At 7 a.m., we would open the doors and there would just be this frenzy of people frenzy and it would not stop," she recalled. "If you worked retail Black Friday during those years, you had to take a lot of vitamins because that was the only way that you can endure it."
According to the National Retail Federation, more than 130 million are set to shop in stores and online on Friday, the peak of what’s become a five-day Thanksgiving shopping weekend.
And if you think that pre-ordering on an app, in-store pickup, or free delivery is the biggest shift this holiday shopping weekend will see, Sukhoy told News 5 there's more to come: AI as a personal shopper.
"Artificial intelligence is already playing a huge part and I expect it to have an even bigger part," she said. "They already know your budgets because they know your bank account. They know the people you have good relationships with versus bad based on the communication interaction. To me, the future is AI entities that are going to be your personal shopper, make your recommendations and make those purchases for you."
Clay LePard is a special projects reporter at News 5 Cleveland. Follow him on Twitter @ClayLePard or on Facebook Clay LePard News 5.
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