Black Friday Creeping into Thursday at Walmart (WMT, TGT, BBY, M, KSS, AMZN)

The retail jamboree known as Black Friday seems to start earlier every year. The door-buster sales used to begin in the wee hours of Friday morning, but several retailers have already announced that the new start time for the year’s biggest shopping day is midnight. Not one simply to follow the pack, Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (NYSE: WMT) now plans to kick off Black Friday at 10 p.m. Thursday night. That’s still Thanksgiving Day — as if that mattered.

Target Corp. (NYSE: TGT), Best Buy Co. Inc. (NYSE: BBY), Macy’s Inc. (NYSE: M), and Kohl’s Corp. (NYSE: KSS) have already said they would kick-off the holiday shopping season at midnight Thursday. Walmart’s move to begin at 10 p.m. is very likely to alter those plans.

There are a couple of interesting twists here. First, the stores are already open on Thanksgiving, though most will have closed for the day by about 6 p.m. Walmart’s 24-hour stores will be open when the Black Friday event begins, perhaps preventing the kind of land-rush stampede that led to the death of an employee in 2008.

But the second twist is that Walmart and its competitors are already open 24/7/365 at their web sites. Walmart’s web site is the second-most visited retail site on the web, trailing only Amazon.com (NASDAQ: AMZN). According to comScore, Amazon’s web sites pulled in close to 104 million unique visitors in September. Walmart pulled about 38 million and Target had about 26 million unique visitors during the month. No other bricks-and-mortar related sites appeared in the top 50.

The interesting point here is that what is now called Cyber Monday — the Monday after the Thanksgiving holiday weekend — has replaced Black Friday as the day when the most retail sales are made. Part of the reason for the shift to web shopping, particularly this year, is the increase of gift buying for one’s self. The reasoning is that people are tired of austerity, they’ve already cut back on spending for exchanging gifts, they look at the holidays as chance to spend without guilt, and who better to reward than themselves.

Whether or not shoppers appear in large numbers at the earlier start to Black Friday, retailers do get to count the added hours as part of that sales day. That will make the numbers look better, when it comes time to report sales and earnings. Retail sales are not expected to improve much over last year’s holiday season. Most estimates are less than 2%. Retailers have to scramble to get their share of an ever-smaller pie, and pumping up excitement for Black Friday may be a little harder this year if there is no “official” kick-off time.

The growth of e-commerce sales has made the Black Friday phenomena not much more than a remnant of our shared memory. The ritual is likely to continue for some years to come, but at some point retailers will acknowledge that they can make more sales with less hassle by expanding Cyber Monday to several days than by expanding Black Friday by a few hours.

Paul Ausick