What Black Friday 2025 Revealed — A Pracademic’s View of Where Retail Is Really Heading

Black Friday is one of those moments that always teaches you something—if you’re willing to look past the headlines and dig into the behavior underneath. As someone who straddles both sides of the industry, I tend to watch these moments a little differently. I lead merchandising and marketing teams. I teach the next generation of retail thinkers. I host conversations with industry peers from every corner of commerce. And I study the patterns emerging from Gen Z with equal parts curiosity and urgency.

That mix gives me a unique vantage point—not quite academic, not quite purely operational. A “pracademic,” as some of us like to say. Someone who lives in the data and the classroom, but also in the decisions, the trade-offs, and the front-line realities of the industry.

From that vantage point, Black Friday 2025 was not about who won or lost—online or stores, AI or analog, Gen Z or everyone else. It was a preview of where retail is going. And it was far more revealing than the headlines suggested.

What did 'Black Friday' reveal - beyond the initial headlines.

The Black Friday Headlines Told One Story. The Behavior Told Another.

The big numbers were everywhere. Online hit a record. Total spend was up. Electronics surged. AI exploded. Gen Z showed up in stores. Every media outlet did what it always does—grab the fastest headline and declare a trend.

But what the weekend actually showed was a customer who is:

• selective, not impulsive,

• credit-enabled, not carefree,

• hybrid by default,

• digitally informed and physically validated,

• and increasingly comfortable moving fluidly between channels, tools, and touchpoints.
  

The consumer wasn’t exuberant. They were intentional.

This is where the distance between reporting and reality widens. The consumer isn’t buying more. They’re buying smarter. And the retail environment—not the headlines—revealed that clearly.

Unified Commerce Isn’t a Strategy Anymore. It’s the Customer’s Starting Point.

In classrooms, we talk about omnichannel as a strategy. In boardrooms, we build teams around it. But the customer has already moved on. What most organizations call “integrated retail” is simply how people shop now.

A typical journey looks like this:

Research on mobile. 

Validate in store. 

Checkout on a phone. 

Pick up through BOPIS. 

Attach food, beauty, or services. 

Return next week.

There’s nothing “future-facing” about it anymore. This is normal.

Retailers measure channels. Consumers chase outcomes.

The retailers who win will be the ones who accept this reality without needing a PowerPoint deck to justify it.

Gen Z is leading the way to the new 'Retail Blueprint.'

Gen Z Isn’t the Future Customer. They’re the Blueprint.

As an educator, I see this firsthand. Gen Z doesn’t distinguish between digital and physical because they never learned to. They navigate the retail ecosystem with an ease that older generations often mistake for complexity.

They start with mobile and AI because that’s where the information lives. They go to stores when they need confidence, community, or interaction. They use BNPL because it fits their budgeting logic. They build experiences around their shopping trips because it’s how they design their time.

They weren’t an outlier on Black Friday. They were the clearest expression of where retail is heading.

And if you want to understand the next decade of retail behavior, pay attention to how Gen Z shops—not what they buy, but how they buy.

Experience Is Becoming the Anchor Tenant

If there was one pattern that stood out across markets, it was the shift from “shopping as a destination” to “shopping as an attachment.” Dining, entertainment, beauty, services, local culture—these were the real traffic drivers.

Retail captured the spillover.

This isn’t decline. This is reorganization.

We’re watching the mall—one of the most iconic formats in American commerce—transform into a place where people want to spend time, not just money.

It is retail’s return to community.

AI Quietly Redefined the First Mile

AI dominated the headlines for its volume metrics, but its real impact was quieter, more foundational. It handled the first mile of the journey—the decision-making. Filtering options. Validating deals. Building shortlists. Guiding consumers to the right place, at the right time, with the right product.

AI didn’t “assist” the shopper this year. It started to shape the upstream path.

This is a shift that many retailers are not prepared for. Meanwhile, the consumer has already normalized it.

We are firmly in the age of 'Unified Commerce' - What does that mean?

A Pracademic’s Read: What This All Really Means

Standing between the classroom, the boardroom, the podcast studio, and the marketplace gives me a clearer view of the connective tissue. This Black Friday wasn’t simply a day of high sales—it was a snapshot of an industry reorganizing itself at a structural level.

Here is the architecture I see:

Digital is now the brain. It drives discovery, validation, and decision-making.

Stores are the body. They deliver experience, confidence, fulfillment, return management, and community.

The customer is the bloodstream. They move through every node without hesitation or regard for organizational boundaries.

The winners won’t be defined by channel performance. They will be defined by orchestration.

The ability to design systems, tools, experiences, services, and environments that reinforce one another—not compete for attribution—will determine who thrives in the next era of commerce.

The consumer has already chosen their preferred way of shopping:

Hybrid. Fast. Intentional. Efficient. Experience-driven. Credit-assisted. AI-enabled. Unified.

The question for retailers isn’t who wins—stores or online. The question is who adapts fast enough to the way customers are already behaving.

If you want the full breakdown—data, patterns, and the complete analysis—I’ve published a more complete article on Retail Relates. It dives deeper into the numbers and the mechanics behind the weekend.

👉 Read the full analysis on Retail Relates:

https://retailrelates.substack.com/p/black-friday-2025-the-future-of-retail

And as always, these reflections are mine—drawn from a career spent learning, leading, teaching, and studying the evolving world of retail and the people who shape it. Feel free to pass along your thoughts on this topic.