Will voucher codes replace the January Sales?

Black Friday is the day after Thanksgiving in the United States and traditionally the biggest day of the retailing calendar. It is the day that heralds the beginning of the Christmas shopping rush and for many retailers and was the day that made their year financially.

It began in Philadelphia (there is no tax on clothes or shoes there) where thousands of people began lonely vigils outside department stores sometimes as early as 4am in order to bag the best offers in the sales and it quickly grew to encompass the whole of the continental US. But in recent years, the Black Friday phenomenon has been under threat by another perhaps even bigger wave of change - Cyber Monday.

For the last 2 years the Monday after Black Friday has seen the biggest amount of online shopping in internet retailing history and heralds yet another change in consumer trends. Many people have offered reasons why this has happened, the most popular being that Black Friday is seen now as simply the day for field research where potential presents are identified along with the price tag. Consumers then go online and find the same items for less and order them. Another possibility is that consumers are fed up with the physical hardship involved in fighting their way through crowds of shoppers when it is much more comfortable to sit at home and shop online instead.

Outside of the US the consumer retail trend has followed a slightly different path with many consumers eagerly anticipating the January sales period as their launch pad for a seasonal spend. But the January Sales trend has encroached more and more into December as retailers desperate to boost their sales figures look to stimulate business through offering discounts even before Christmas.

In both of these scenarios there is one constant ingredient that has genuinely swung the buying pendulum towards the online marketplace and that is the humble voucher code. Initially begun by a wine merchant via a genius marketing campaign that 'mistakenly leaked ' an online discount opportunity meant for only friends and family onto the internet, voucher codes have become common parlance in online retailing.

Who in their right mind would not take advantage of getting a discount when it is so easy to get hold of?. The secret of course is that you would not perhaps think of buying that product in the first place if it weren't for the offered voucher code. But this ease of access means that our traditional buying habits are under threat simply because we are now at the mercy of the voucher code system.

Smart retailers will now use our new found dependence to manipulate the buying cycles to suit their own agendas. So, does this mean that the traditional January sales are under threat? The reality is that we as consumers will ultimately decide where and when we want to spend our money, but in the short term we will be highly influenced by when the voucher codes are offered to us and if that means that we forgo January for December or February then so be it.