Black Friday no longer describes a day; it describes a season, and by the time Thanksgiving actually arrives in any given year, most of the serious discounting has already happened.
Key Points
- Major retailers including BJ’s, Lowe’s, Best Buy, Costco, and Target launched 2026 holiday promotions in late October and early November, weeks ahead of the traditional post-Thanksgiving date
- Walmart structured its season into three distinct events running November 12 through December 2, rather than one single sale day
- Costco’s holiday savings pages listed discount waves stretching from October 30 through November 30
- The shift reflects a decade-plus trend of retailers moving deals earlier to capture shoppers who now begin holiday buying in the first week of November
- Not every retailer had committed to a schedule by early November — Amazon and Macy’s had yet to release theirs — showing the migration is widespread but not yet universal
What Retailers Actually Announced
By November 4, 2026, the contours of the season were already visible. BJ’s Wholesale Club, Lowe’s, and Best Buy had opened early promotions, while Target, Home Depot, JCPenney, Kohl’s, and Walmart were set to roll out major events by November 12. The dates themselves tell the story better than any marketing copy: BJ’s opened its early Black Friday sale on October 23, Lowe’s followed on October 29, Best Buy and Costco both began October 30, and Target’s Deal of the Day series started November 1. None of this activity waited for the fourth Thursday in November. It arrived while most shoppers were still finishing Halloween candy.
Walmart’s approach illustrates how far the structure has evolved from a single doorbuster morning. Based on an October 26 announcement, the company organized its season into three distinct waves running from November 12 through December 2. The first wave, Early Black Friday Deals, opened online at 12:01 a.m. Eastern and in stores at 6 a.m. local time on November 12. Costco went further still, listing holiday savings waves on its site covering October 30 through November 15, a second wave from November 16 through 30, a Thanksgiving Day online list, an actual Black Friday weekend wave from November 27 through 30, and a separate Cyber Monday push. Best Buy layered in Doorbuster promotions starting October 30, an Early Black Friday phase beginning November 6, a recurring Friday deal drop, and a main event running November 19 through 28. Four different retailers, four different calendars, one shared instinct: start before the competition does.
How a Single Day Became a Six-Week Season
This did not happen overnight, and it did not happen by accident. Retailers have been pulling holiday promotions earlier for more than a decade, tracking a demand curve that shifted well before any single company made it policy. In 2019, 56% of surveyed shoppers said they had started holiday gift buying during the first week of November, up from 48% a decade earlier — a trend the National Retail Federation and retail analysts have tracked closely, since it directly informs when a chain decides to advertise its first discounts. The pandemic then compressed years of gradual change into a single season: 2020 saw retailers extend promotions across entire months rather than days, with more than 100 million shoppers reportedly buying online on Black Friday itself rather than waiting in line.
The 2022 holiday season confirmed the pattern was structural rather than cyclical. Inventory bloat left major chains — Amazon, Target, and Walmart among them — announcing discounts weeks ahead of Thanksgiving, deeper than in prior years, because warehouses were fuller than retailers wanted heading into the new year. That dynamic has repeated in various forms ever since: whenever retailers sit on excess stock or sense soft consumer confidence, the response is to pull deals forward rather than hold them for a single concentrated event. Analysts in the UK retail sector have made the identical observation, noting that shoppers now deliberately hold back spending in anticipation of November discounts they’ve come to expect as a near-certainty, which in turn forces retailers to deliver earlier or risk losing the sale entirely to a competitor who does.
What the Label Still Means — and What It Doesn’t
One caution belongs in any account of this season: the promotional names attached to these events are not interchangeable, even when press coverage treats them that way. Costco’s “Holiday Savings,” Best Buy’s “Doorbusters,” and Target’s “Deal of the Day” are distinct campaigns with different terms, exclusions, and membership requirements, not a single uniform Black Friday event wearing different labels. A shopper comparing advertised savings across chains is comparing different promotional structures, not identical discount depth — a distinction that matters when deciding where to actually spend.
It’s also worth remembering that the existence of an early sale says nothing about how good the sale is. Independent price research has repeatedly found that advertised Black Friday discounts don’t always represent genuine price drops relative to the rest of the year; one annual audit of thousands of deals across major retailers found that more than a third of advertised “sale” prices had appeared at the same or a lower price earlier in the year. The lesson for shoppers is less about timing than about verification — an early deal calendar tells you when a retailer wants your attention, not whether the price in front of you is actually the best one you’ll see all season.
Why the biggest discount is rarely the most profitable one — and how to design short, deep promotions using evidence rather than intuition. https://t.co/WIvDrl2nRj
— Marek Kosno (@MarekKosno) November 9, 2026
Where This Leaves the Modern Shopper
The practical upshot for 2026, and for every holiday season likely to follow it, is that “Black Friday” has become shorthand for a retail strategy rather than a calendar date. Retailers that wait until the actual Friday after Thanksgiving to launch their best offers are now the exception, not the rule, and the chains named in this year’s early announcements — BJ’s, Lowe’s, Best Buy, Costco, Target, Walmart, Home Depot, JCPenney, and Kohl’s — represent a large share of total U.S. holiday retail spending. Shoppers who still plan their year around a single doorbuster morning are, in effect, arriving to a party that started three weeks earlier.
Sources:
washingtontimes.com, classified.washingtontimes.com
