Black Friday Isn’t Your Busiest Week. For Most Retailers, it’s Not Even Close

For many retail operations teams, Black Friday week is still the operational summit of the year: peak staffing, peak inventory positioning, peak everything. InMarket’s 2026 Holiday Shopping InSights report, drawn from InMarket’s commerce and visitation data alongside a survey fielded with Kantar, suggests that assumption is wrong for most of the industry, and the operational plan built around it is aimed at the wrong week.

InMarket’s commerce and visitation data, covering June 2025 through February 2026, indexes weekly in-store visitation across major retail categories. Apparel and department stores do, in fact, peak around Black Friday: Gap, Old Navy, American Eagle Outfitters, lululemon, Kate Spade, and Victoria’s Secret all hit their highest visitation the week of Nov. 24, alongside Macy’s, JCPenney, and Best Buy. If that’s the category a retailer competes in, the existing plan targets the right week.

Most retailers aren’t in that category. Eight of the 10 biggest big-box, discount, and specialty retailers — Walmart, Target, Costco, Sam's Club, Dollar Tree, T.J. Maxx, Marshalls, and Ross — didn’t hit their peak visitation until the week of Dec. 15, what we’re calling the "Final Dash." For this group, Black Friday isn’t the busiest week of the season.

The gift card data makes the same point with sharper numbers. Gift card purchases roughly doubled over Black Friday weekend compared to the prior month’s baseline. A real lift, yes, however, the average card value held flat. The week before Christmas told a different story entirely: purchase volume jumped to seven times the pre-season baseline, and average card value rose 14 percent on top of that. A staffing and inventory plan built to absorb a 2x demand spike over Black Friday weekend isn't built to absorb a 7x spike three weeks later, and for most retailers, the second spike is the bigger one.

This is where a single, Black-Friday-anchored operational plan runs into trouble. A plan that pulls labor, freight, and inventory forward to peak in late November, then eases off through December on the assumption that the big push already happened, will leave most retail categories understaffed and understocked for the week that actually decides the quarter.

Physical stores compound the stakes here rather than reducing them. More than three-quarters (77 percent) of consumers plan to shop in physical stores this holiday season, still the widest-reach channel in the data, and it isn’t losing ground to online. Seventy percent plan to shop online marketplaces like Amazon.com, 46 percent retailer websites, and 35 percent expect to use buy online, pickup in-store. These aren’t substitutes pulling from the same pool of demand; they’re additive. The average shopper is doing more than one. A retailer treating December store traffic as an afterthought because “shopping moved online” is reading the data backward.

The fix isn’t a bigger Black Friday plan stretched to cover December, too. It’s two plans. One built around the apparel and department store categories that genuinely peak around Thanksgiving weekend, with staffing, promotions, and inventory positioned accordingly. A second, distinct plan for the categories where Black Friday is a moment but the Final Dash is the event: bigger labor commitments in mid-December, inventory buffers that don’t get drawn down too early, and gift card operations, from card stock to checkout throughput, built for a 7x week rather than a 2x one.

Retailers that get this right in the next few weeks won’t be making a bigger bet on Black Friday. They’ll be making sure the bet that actually matters, the one in the third week of December, isn’t an afterthought bolted onto a plan built for a different week entirely.

Gerry Joyce is the vice president, retail practice lead at InMarket, bringing 20-plus years of leadership and sales experience across retail and digital media.