Remember When Retail Felt… Different?
A Nostalgic Look at Festive Commerce - And What Comes Next
People used to take actual annual leave to do their Christmas shopping. Not to recover from a cold, not to “finish up a project”, but to walk around town, stand in queues, browse the aisles with a lukewarm coffee, and maybe get a pub lunch out of it. It was almost a seasonal rite of passage: coat zipped up, list in hand, bags digging into your hands as you tried to remember where you parked. It wasn’t glamorous, but it had a pace. A rhythm. A shared understanding that this is simply what December required of you.
These days, you don’t even need to be awake. A discount notification arrives at 2:07 a.m. telling you something is 38% off for the next nine minutes, and you buy it half-asleep with a thumbprint. Progress, apparently.
Festive retail has always evolved, but the last twenty years have been a wholesale rewrite of the rules. And if you feel like something fundamental has shifted, you’re not imagining it. The rituals that anchored the season; shopping in person, Boxing Day doorbusters, the January pilgrimage for a bargain, have evaporated. What’s replaced them is louder, longer, more engineered, and somehow less memorable. Let’s be honest: Christmas commerce used to feel different. Slower. Maybe even a little more human.
And then November happened.
When Boxing Day Was the Main Event
Before discounts stretched across the whole of November like an overly long marketing experiment, Boxing Day was the crown jewel. People queued outside department stores at dawn. Retailers saved their biggest markdowns for the 26th. Staff steeled themselves for a rush that felt more like an organised stampede than a sale.
If you worked in retail, you knew the choreography: unlock the door, step back, hope no one slips on the linoleum. If you shopped the sales, you planned your route with military precision: get the jackets first, then electronics, then whatever’s left in homeware. The whole thing had a charm. Even the bad parts are strangely fond memories now.
Then there was the Christmas Eve dash. Someone (usually a dad, sometimes an uncle) would end up sprinting into town with an hour to spare because a present had been forgotten. The shops were packed with similarly disorganised souls, each operating on adrenaline and fear. You’d grab whatever was left, wrap it badly, and everyone pretended it was intentional.
That era wasn’t efficient. But it was recognisable. It had character.
Then Black Friday Happened (And Happened. And Happened.)
The UK didn’t ask for Black Friday, but it arrived anyway, imported wholesale from a holiday we don’t celebrate, tied to a cultural moment we don’t have, and rapidly adopted because someone in a boardroom decided year-on-year growth wasn’t going to deliver itself.
At first, it felt like an event. One day of aggressive offers. Then a weekend. Then, inevitably, a week. Before long, November became a rolling cycle of “early access”, “extended savings”, “last chance”, and “actually this is the real last chance we promise”.
The novelty wore off faster than retailers expected. When everything is always on sale, nothing feels like a sale. And consumers noticed. The urgency evaporated. The queues disappeared. The margin disappeared with them. Meanwhile, the promotional calendar expanded until even the most loyal customers couldn’t keep up.
Black Friday peaked somewhere between “flash sale” and “flash month”. And what comes after a peak? Fatigue. Promotional exhaustion. A general sense that we’re all participating in a season-long negotiation no one’s enjoying.
Cyber Monday’s Weird Origin Story
Cyber Monday shouldn’t exist, at least not in the form it does today. It started because the only place many people had internet was the office. After a long weekend, they’d come in, log on, feel a bit fragile, and start browsing. Retailers spotted the pattern and pounced.
It’s absurd if you think about it. One of the biggest retail moments of the year exists because people once couldn’t shop online at home. Yet it stuck. Online shopping democratised itself, speeds improved, networks expanded, but the industry kept Cyber Monday alive out of habit.
If Boxing Day was tradition, Cyber Monday is inertia.
And Then Singles’ Day Wandered In From the East
Quietly, while the West was busy turning one day of discounts into thirty, something else was gaining momentum: Singles’ Day.
Originally a kind of anti-Valentine’s Day, Singles’ Day is gloriously uncomplicated. You don’t need a partner. You don’t need a reason. You just buy yourself something. A pure self-gifting celebration with none of the emotional admin attached to traditional holidays.
It landed softly at first. A few curious shoppers. A few adventurous brands. Then a wider cultural shift happened: people stopped waiting for permission to treat themselves. More people live alone, more people delay relationships, more people favour autonomy, and retail follows cultural behaviour more than marketing theory.
Suddenly Singles’ Day looks less like a novelty and more like a preview of where consumption is heading: personalised, self-directed, emotionally unburdened by tradition.
It may never overtake November in the West. But it doesn’t need to. It’s a symptom of a bigger movement: shoppers choosing their own celebratory moments rather than letting the calendar dictate them.
The Disposable Income Squeeze (A Slightly Less Fun Section)
Once upon a time, January sales mattered because January wallets were fuller. People had disposable income. They didn’t finish December in overdrafts or sit staring at bank apps with the nausea of someone who just remembered how much they spent on dinner.
Fast forward to now, and the entire festive season is defined by a simple truth: the money isn’t there anymore. Rising costs have reshaped behaviour. November’s early promotions don’t just pull demand forward, they hoover up whatever’s left.
By the time January arrives, everyone is emotionally and financially spent. Retailers know this, so the January sale has become a whisper instead of a national tradition.
The old model relied on pent-up demand. The new model relies on squeezed households making decisions earlier, faster, and with less enthusiasm.
So Where Is All This Actually Going?
Strip away the nostalgia and you’re left with a retail calendar that no longer behaves like a calendar at all. Seasonal moments used to be clear, bounded, and predictable. Now it’s all blur. A kind of ambient promotion season that stretches from early November to the moment shipping deadlines hit.
The next decade won’t undo that. If anything, the pace accelerates.
AI will be the accelerant. If a shopper can ask an assistant to find the best deal anywhere on the internet, the idea of a “sale moment” collapses. The system will do the hunting for them. The illusion of scarcity disappears. The tactical advantage disappears with it.
Sales events will become personalised rather than seasonal. Your own AI agent will know when you’re about to buy a new appliance before you do. It will time the purchase, compare offers, weigh shipping fees and return policies, and convert when the price crosses its internal threshold. Retailers will be negotiating with software, not impulse.
Singles’ Day fits neatly into this future because it isn’t tied to a cultural anchor. It’s flexible. It’s self-directed. It’s emotionally light. In other words, perfectly designed for an era where you shop because you want to, not because the industry tells you to.
Black Friday will stick around, of course. Retail loves a familiar banner even after the meaning drains out of it. But its cultural significance will erode. It becomes background noise: another label in a season full of labels.
The real differentiator won’t be timing. It’ll be experience, community, value clarity, and operational competence. The things that have always mattered, but which get rediscovered every time the promotional machinery starts to cannibalise itself.
Retail Didn’t Lose Its Magic. We Just Swapped the Rituals.
Queues at dawn. Christmas Eve panic shops. The Boxing Day pilgrimage. They weren’t efficient. They weren’t elegant. But they were shared. You knew where you stood.
Now we’ve traded all that for app alerts, algorithmic price drops, and a month-long negotiation known as “November”. It’s cleaner. Faster. Optimised. And somehow less memorable.
Retail didn’t lose its magic. It just lost its rhythm. And depending on which generation you ask, that’s either progress… or exactly why the season doesn’t feel quite the same anymore.
As a retail consultant of over 30 years I really cannot disagree with what you write; I think the key sentence is this: 'The real differentiator won’t be timing. It’ll be experience, community, value clarity, and operational competence. The things that have always mattered, but which get rediscovered every time the promotional machinery starts to cannibalise itself.' This is key, I am new to Substack but not to helping retailers achieve exactly this and I will be launching a full year's worth of advice on January 7th to democratise exactly how this can be achieved based on my experience of working with the globes largest retailers. Oh, and Black Friday? It only drove an increase of 1.4% in sales this year. Perhaps the timing of the budget, or perhaps fatigue really has kicked in.