Everything to know about Black Friday 2025: Where and when to shop sales

Retailers are front-loading and extending Black Friday into a multi-week Cyber Week this year around Black Friday on Nov. 28, 2025, with major players announcing staggered starts—Amazon and Best Buy kick off sales on Nov. 20, Walmart runs online deals Nov. 25–27 and in-store Nov. 28–30, Target’s week-long event begins Nov. 23, and Macy’s, Kohl’s, Ulta and Sephora are offering early-access and rolling promotions through Cyber Monday and into December. Offers span electronics, apparel, home goods and beauty (many with 25–60% discounts cited) and are accompanied by membership and app-based incentives (eg, Walmart+ promotion and Sephora app early access), underscoring an industry-wide push to capture online share. For investors, the shift to earlier, prolonged discounting signals intensified competition for holiday spend that may boost volume and inventory turnover but compress margins and complicate revenue timing and holiday forecasting, making consumer response and promotional cadence key monitoring points.

Analysis

Major U.S. retailers have materially front-loaded and extended Black Friday into a multi-week Cyber Week cadence ahead of Friday, Nov. 28, 2025: Amazon and Best Buy start sales on Nov. 20, Walmart runs online deals Nov. 25–27 and in-store Nov. 28–30 (with a temporary 50% off Walmart+ annual membership), Target’s week-long event begins Nov. 23, Macy’s and Kohl’s run rolling early-access windows, Ulta and Sephora emphasize app/online early access, and listed discounts range from roughly 25%–60% across electronics, apparel, home and beauty. Best-in-class device discounts cited include up to 50% off Amazon hardware and up to 25% off Apple products at Best Buy; category-specific markdowns include up to 60% at Walmart and 50% at Target and Ulta. The industry-wide shift to longer, staggered promotions and membership/app incentives should boost online share and volume generation but increase promotional overlap and inventory turnover timing. Given the mildly positive sentiment signal (0.25) and modest market-impact score, the near-term outlook favors volume capture yet implies margin pressure and greater forecasting uncertainty for retailers, making promotional cadence, membership uptake and gross-margin trends the primary monitoring points.

Key Decisions for Investors

• Consider overweighting omnichannel and e-commerce leaders (AMZN, WMT, TGT) to capture extended Cyber Week volume, while keeping position sizes prudent given the modest positive market-impact signal
• Prioritize monitoring promotional depth, inventory levels and gross-margin disclosure in upcoming retail reports and be ready to trim cyclically exposed retail longs if discounts exceed current guidance
• Use short-dated hedges or reduce exposure ahead of key November trading windows if early data show weaker-than-expected membership uptake (eg, Walmart+) or slower e-commerce conversion from app-driven promotions