Some local media are already reporting on subdued expectations of what has been termed 'Bleak Friday', and we can partly confirm that. 

On the one hand, South Africans planning to engage with Black Friday in some way are excited: Nearly two out of three say they are five-out-of-five excited for Black Friday. But while 'gifts for myself' was the third most-often mentioned type of planned purchase, household basics like groceries and other necessities occupied the top two spots.

So Black Friday is not being seen as an excuse to indulge oneself but rather as a way to stretch the beleaguered household grocery budget. 

Sadly, for the excited grocery shoppers, though, they're not really expecting the grocery retailers to come to the party in terms of Black Friday specials. When we asked people to choose which retailers they expected to have the best Black Friday deals, only one supermarket made the top six.

There are high expectations of Massmart, with Game and Makro taking the number one and number four spots on this list, respectively. Takealot represents the online retailers at number two. Checkers is the sole supermarket at number three, and Clicks and Mr Price round out the top six.

A whopping 69% of respondents said they've set money aside to spend on Black Friday deals. We didn't demand to see their piggy banks, so we confess that we're a little skeptical about this claim.

But if shoppers spend what they say they plan to spend, our battered economy can expect a healthy boost, with 30% planning to spend between R5 000 and R10 000 and a further 11% planning to spend more than R10 000.

The spenders over-represented in the plus R5 000 category are men, 18 to 24-year-olds and middle-income households (those earning between R10 000 and R30 000).

These big spenders are:
  • particularly excited about Black Friday (84%)
  • more likely than lower-spenders to have saved up for Black Friday
  • already shopping Black Friday deals, and
  • more likely than lower-spenders to be planning to shop Black Friday grocery deals.

So, it seems the winning retail strategy will be to attract the big spenders and get them to concentrate their spending in one place rather than trying to get a few ZAR out of thousands of shoppers' wallets.

Watch this space for our follow-up post-Black Friday research when we report on what actually got spent and on what.


For more information, visit www.tradeintelligence.co.za.