Franksgiving: A Black Friday Strategy for Small Business When Shoppers Flinch at Prices

Law Smith

Founder & President, Tocobaga

Law Smith is the Founder and President of Tocobaga, a Tampa-based ROI-focused marketing agency and SMB advisory. He has managed integrated marketing programs for e-commerce brands spanning paid search, paid social, email, and SEO, with every program anchored to ROAS, CPA, and LTV rather than impressions and clicks. With 1,000,000+ emails deployed and 600+ campaigns executed, he brings the full-funnel discipline that separates stores that scale from stores that stall. Tocobaga is a Google Partner and Squarespace Gold Partner headquartered in Ybor City.

On August 14, 1939, Franklin Roosevelt held an informal press conference on Campobello Island, his family's summer retreat off New Brunswick, and moved Thanksgiving.* Not the meaning of it. The date. November 1939 had five Thursdays, and custom put the holiday on the last one, November 30. That would have left 24 shopping days until Christmas, and the people who sold things for a living considered 24 days a crime against commerce.† Roosevelt announced that Thanksgiving would arrive a week early, on November 23.

The man most often credited with the idea was Fred Lazarus Jr., a small, relentless heir to an Ohio department store family and the driving force behind Federated Department Stores, a $300 million empire by 1948. Fortune once wrote that he ran his stores "much as a small boy would lead a herd of elephants."† The National Archives' paper trail shows the lobbying arrived in stereo. A June 26 memo from Lowell Mellett noted that Ohio retail and publishing groups wanted the change. On August 4, Lew Hahn of the National Retail Dry Goods Association wrote Commerce Secretary Harry Hopkins with the math: 12 to 15 percent of the country's annual retail trade happened between Thanksgiving and Christmas.* The economy was still limping out of the recession of 1937 to 1938. A longer season sounded like a stimulus package that cost the Treasury nothing.

The country did not take it well. A Gallup poll found 62 percent of Americans opposed the switch.* Republicans mocked the new date as "Franksgiving."† More than half the governors kept the old date, so 1939 had two Thanksgivings, and Texas, Colorado and Mississippi observed both. Football schedules buckled. Cornell's athletic director grumbled about getting "only five days' rest after the Michigan game." A board in Plymouth, Massachusetts, said the switch sacrificed "the real significance of the day" to commercial interests.*

Then came the receipts, such as they were. When New York Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia's office polled 2,000 of the city's stores, only 203 bothered to answer: 76 favored the earlier date, 94 opposed it and 33 had no opinion. A survey of 22 cities found no clear sales gain. On May 20, 1941, Roosevelt conceded that the experiment "did not work." Congress fixed Thanksgiving to the fourth Thursday of November, and Roosevelt signed the resolution on December 26, 1941.*

Read that again with a merchant's eyes. The most powerful retailers in America got a President to move a national holiday, won seven extra days and could not prove the days mattered. The calendar was never the real constraint. Eighty-seven years later, big retailers start holiday discounting in the first week of November, and 43 percent of holiday shoppers planned to start before November arrived.‡,§ Nobody needs a proclamation anymore. They just send an email.

At Tocobaga, the ROI-focused marketing agency and SMB advisory Law Smith runs out of Ybor City in Tampa and at SolvingHow.com, the question owners keep bringing to the table this fall goes like this: how should a business adjust pricing, promotions and inventory for the holidays when customers flinch at every price increase? It is the right question, asked with about a month to spare. Black Friday 2026 lands on November 27, Small Business Saturday on November 28 and Cyber Monday on November 30. What follows is the playbook Tocobaga uses with small retailers, e-commerce brands and local service businesses, built on 2025 actuals and 2026 forecasts, with the margin math shown in full. The short version fits on an index card. The businesses that win the season plan it. The ones that lose react to it, usually with a sitewide discount.

When is Black Friday 2026, and how long is the holiday shopping season?

Black Friday 2026 is Friday, November 27, the day after Thanksgiving on November 26, followed by Small Business Saturday on November 28 and Cyber Monday on November 30. Counting from Black Friday through Christmas Eve, the 2026 season has 28 shopping days, one more than the 27 in 2025.†

That count is a technicality, because the season no longer starts on Black Friday. Adobe expects online discounts to run up to 14 percent in early November, climb to 21 percent just before Thanksgiving, peak at up to 30 percent during Cyber Week and then settle at 10 to 15 percent through December.§ Adobe forecasts Cyber Week, Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday, at $47.5 billion in online spending, about 17.3 percent of the entire season packed into five days. Black Friday alone is projected at $12.9 billion online and Cyber Monday at $15.1 billion.§

So the real calendar has three waves, and a small business needs a job assigned to each one:

• Early November through about November 20: the list-building and early-access window, when big-box discounts are shallow and ad costs have not peaked.

• Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday, November 26 to 30: the loudest five days of the year, when owned channels like email and SMS outperform rented attention.

• December 1 through Christmas Eve: the gift-card, last-shipping-day and local-pickup window, when convenience beats price for the procrastinators.

Fred Lazarus fought a President for seven extra days. In 2026 the national chains took the whole month without asking anyone. The lesson for a small business is not to fight that calendar. It is to stop pretending the season is one weekend. A boutique that spends its entire promotional budget on Black Friday morning is shouting in the one week when it is least likely to be heard, against competitors with bigger megaphones and deeper discounts.

The first wave matters most, and it is the one most owners skip. Early November is when attention is cheapest, when shoppers are browsing rather than buying, and when a business can collect the email addresses and phone numbers it will sell to later. A plan that starts on Thanksgiving is a plan that starts too late.

How common holiday promotions compare on margin, best use and risk for a small business in 2026.

Promotion	Effect on margin	Best for	Watch out for
Sitewide 25% off	Cuts contribution per order about 43% in Tocobaga's worked example	Clearing aged or seasonal inventory	Trains customers to wait and recruits deal-only buyers
Gift with purchase	Costs only the gift's landed cost and raises order value	Brands with a low-cost, high-perceived-value add-on	The gift must feel premium, not like leftover stock
Tiered spend threshold	Effective 15 to 20% off, only on bigger baskets	Raising average order value	Thresholds set too far above the average order get ignored
Bundle or gift set	Moves two or more units per order at a modest markdown	Pairing bestsellers with slower movers	Bundles that hide weak products hurt reviews
Loyalty early access	Full margin; the price does not change	Rewarding repeat buyers and growing the list	Only works if list building starts in October
Bonus gift card	Bonus is redeemed in slow months, not December	Service businesses and local shops	Set clear redemption dates and terms
Buy now, pay later	Merchant fee usually higher than card fees (Adobe: $20B BNPL in 2025)	Orders above $100 and gift sets	Never make it the headline offer

How much will people spend this holiday season in 2026?

The National Retail Federation forecasts that November and December 2026 retail sales will grow 4.2 percent to $1.013 trillion. Online, Adobe forecasts $275.1 billion, up 6.7 percent, so e-commerce keeps taking a bigger slice of a bigger pie.‡,§

A 4.2 percent gain would be strong. It is also a forecast, and forecasts are weather reports, not contracts. In 2025, NRF predicted growth of 3.7 to 4.2 percent, and actual holiday sales grew 3.1 percent to $972 billion.‖ Adobe's 2025 tally came in at $257.8 billion online, up 6.8 percent, with Cyber Monday hitting $14.25 billion, the biggest e-commerce day of the year.¶ Online held up better than the total, which says something about where the marginal dollar is going.

At the household level, Deloitte's 2026 survey of 4,000 consumers puts expected holiday spending at $1,654, up 4 percent from $1,595. The mix is the interesting part. Spending on retail goods is expected to jump 10 percent to $988, while spending on holiday activities falls 4 percent to $666.** Translation: people are skipping the extra party and still buying the gift.

For an individual business, the national number matters less than the share of its own year riding on these eight weeks. Holiday sales account for almost a fifth of annual retail sales nationally, and about a third for department stores.† A Shopify brand doing $4 million a year that follows the national pattern books roughly $760,000 to $800,000 between November 1 and December 31. If its holiday plan is three Instagram posts and a coupon code, it is improvising with a fifth of its revenue.

The labor market adds one more clue. NRF expects retailers to hire 325,000 to 375,000 seasonal workers, a modest number that chief economist Mark Mathews tied to a "low hire, low fire" environment.‡,‖ Retailers are betting on a decent season, not a blowout, and they are staffing for it. A small business should plan the same way: confident enough to show up, disciplined enough not to bet the first quarter on December.

How much of the 2026 holiday sales growth is just higher prices?

About half. NRF chief economist Mark Mathews expects nearly half of the nominal growth to come from real consumer spending, which means the other half is the same stuff costing more.‖

Run the arithmetic. The gap between $972 billion in 2025 and $1.013 trillion in 2026 is about $41 billion. If nearly half is real, roughly $20 billion is extra goods changing hands, and roughly $20 billion is inflation in a holiday sweater. Real growth lands closer to 2 percent than 4. Mathews pointed specifically to diesel and memory-chip prices pressuring electronics, one of the season's biggest gift categories.‖

Tariffs are a large part of the price story. Harvard Business School professor Alberto Cavallo's team tracked nearly 360,000 products at five major U.S. retailers and found that up to 43 percent of the tariff burden reached consumers in the first seven months after the new tariffs, with companies absorbing the rest. By March 2026, consumer prices were running 3.3 percent above a year earlier.††

Small businesses are passing costs along too. NFIB's September 2026 survey found a net 31 percent of owners plan to raise prices in the next three months, against a historical average of 22, and a net 31 percent have already raised them, against a historical average of 14. Twenty percent named inflation their single most important problem, nearly triple the long-run average of 7 percent.‡‡

That combination sets the trap. If companies absorbed more than half of the tariff hit, their margins are thinner heading into the season than they were a year ago. A sitewide 25 percent discount taken off a thinner margin is not the same promotion it was in 2024. It is a bigger bite out of a smaller sandwich.

There is a reporting trap too. A business whose holiday revenue grows 4 percent while its prices rose 4 percent did not grow. It sold the same number of things for more money and probably made less on each one, because its costs rose first. The honest scoreboard for December 2026 is units, orders and contribution profit, not top-line revenue compared with last year.

Are shoppers more price sensitive this holiday season?

Yes, in what they say, and less than expected in what they do. The University of Michigan's preliminary October 2026 consumer sentiment reading fell to 46.3, only 1.5 points above the all-time low of 44.8 set in May, and its current-conditions index hit a record low of 44.7.§§

Survey director Joanne Hsu summed up the mood bluntly: "Frustration over cost-of-living continues to mount." Only about 31 percent of consumers expect to spend as usual over the coming year, and just over half plan to cut back on things like household goods, dining out and vacations.§§ NRF found 56 percent of holiday shoppers say the state of the economy will affect their spending plans.‡

And yet the same shoppers are planning to spend more. Deloitte's 2026 survey found that 38 percent are "holiday value seekers" who use five or more money-saving behaviors, such as promotions, rewards and store brands, and those value seekers expect to spend 12 percent more than everyone else. Forty-seven percent said they would rather give one meaningful, higher-cost gift than several smaller ones.**

That is the most useful finding in the season's research, and it is easy to miss. Value-seeking is not the same thing as discount-seeking. A value seeker wants to feel smart about the purchase. A discount is one way to deliver that feeling, and it is the most expensive way. A free gift that feels generous, a bundle that solves an entire gift list, a guarantee, a gift receipt, a delivery date that is actually kept: each of those makes a buyer feel smart without cutting the price of the thing itself.

Picture the buyer in December 2026. Anxious about grocery bills, annoyed by gas prices, determined to give one great gift to the person who matters most. That buyer is not hunting for the lowest price on the internet. That buyer is hunting for permission to spend. The businesses that grant permission, with proof, will outsell the ones that simply knock 25 percent off.

Should small businesses discount on Black Friday?

Most small businesses should not run a sitewide percentage-off sale on Black Friday. They should run a targeted offer that protects margin, raises order value and rewards the customers worth keeping, and save true markdowns for inventory that needs to leave.

Start with the competition. Adobe expects peak online discounts of 30 percent in electronics, 29 percent in toys and 23 percent in apparel and computers this season.§ Those discounts come from companies buying in volumes a small brand cannot touch. A $4 million Shopify brand that matches a national chain's discount is a welterweight who agreed to fight at heavyweight because the purse looked bigger.

Then consider who a deep discount attracts. When researchers from Boston University, Harvard and Yale studied 16,692 Groupon deals across 20 U.S. metro areas, reviews written by Groupon customers averaged 3.27 stars, against 3.73 for everyone else. The authors traced the gap to several causes, including that deal buyers were more often experimenting with a business they had never tried.‖‖ A discount is a recruiting ad. It recruits people who respond to discounts.

There is also the reference-price problem. A customer who pays $60 for an $80 candle in November now believes it is a $60 candle. In March, $80 looks like a markup. Discounting does not just cost margin on the day. It rewrites the price tag in the customer's memory, and the business spends the rest of the year buying that memory back. Tocobaga's earlier field guide to retention math, Norm's Stool Pays the Rent, makes the broader case that repeat customers buying at full price are where the money actually lives.

None of this means a business should sit out the weekend. Franksgiving's lesson applies directly. Lazarus's answer to a weak season was more of something: more days. A sitewide discount is the modern version: more volume. Both treat the length of the line as the goal. The goal is the margin left over after the line goes home.

How much does a 25 percent off sale actually cost a small business?

For a brand with a contribution margin between 50 and 70 percent, a 25 percent discount has to lift order volume by roughly 55 to 100 percent just to earn the same profit dollars, because product, shipping and fulfillment costs do not get 25 percent cheaper. The exact break-even depends on the margins, so here is the full math for one realistic brand.

Meet a hypothetical Shopify home-fragrance brand doing $4 million a year. Its average order is $80. Landed product cost, tariffs included, is 30 percent of retail, or $24 an order. Pick, pack and shipping cost $9 an order. Payment fees run about 3 percent, or $2.40. At full price, each order contributes $44.60 toward ad spend, payroll and profit: $80 minus $24 minus $9 minus $2.40.

Now run 25 percent off sitewide. The average order drops to $60. Product cost does not move, since the candle cost what it cost, and neither does shipping. Fees fall to $1.80. Contribution per order becomes $60 minus $24 minus $9 minus $1.80, or $25.20. Each order now earns 43 percent less. To make the same contribution dollars, the brand needs 77 percent more orders, because $44.60 divided by $25.20 is 1.77.

Now the alternative, a gift with purchase. Orders of $100 or more get a free travel-size candle that retails for $28 and costs the brand $5 landed. Suppose 55 percent of orders clear the threshold at an average of $112, and the other 45 percent stay at $80 with no gift. A qualifying order contributes $112 minus $33.60 in product, minus $5 for the gift, minus $9.50 for a slightly heavier box, minus $3.36 in fees, or $60.54. Blend the two groups and the average order contributes about $53.37, on an average order value of $97.60.

Put real volume on it. Say the brand would sell 2,000 orders over Cyber Week with no offer at all. Be generous to the sale and assume 25 percent off lifts orders by 50 percent, to 3,000. Assume the gift lifts orders by only 10 percent, to 2,200.

• No offer: 2,000 orders, $160,000 in revenue, $89,200 in contribution.

• 25 percent off sitewide: 3,000 orders, $180,000 in revenue, $75,600 in contribution.

• Gift with purchase over $100: 2,200 orders, $214,720 in revenue, about $117,400 in contribution.

The sale produced the most orders and the busiest warehouse, and it earned $13,600 less than doing nothing. The gift with purchase produced fewer orders than the sale, more revenue than either alternative and about $41,800 more contribution than the discount. The sale wins the screenshot in the group chat. The gift wins the bank deposit.

Two more costs make the discount look worse. First, returns. NRF expects about 17 percent of holiday sales to come back, every returned order still cost $9 to ship out, and the sale created 1,000 extra orders to return.¶¶ Second, tariffs. If landed cost crept from 26 percent of retail to 30 percent over the past two years, full-price contribution already fell by $3.20 an order before any promotion, and the discount's break-even climbed with it.

This is why Tocobaga builds every holiday plan on contribution per order, not revenue. Revenue is the applause. Contribution is the paycheck. An owner who cannot state contribution per order before choosing an offer is choosing the offer by vibe, and the vibe in late November is always "match the big guys."

How can a small business run holiday promotions without discounting?

Use offers that add value instead of subtracting price: gifts with purchase, bundles, tiered spend thresholds, loyalty early access, bonus gift cards and flexible payment. Each one gives the value-seeking shopper a reason to feel smart while keeping the price of the core product intact.

Gifts with purchase. The research favors the free gift more than most owners expect. In a study published in the Journal of Consumer Research, Mauricio Palmeira and Joydeep Srivastava had shoppers buy an $8.95 jar of organic tomato sauce. Shoppers offered spaghetti free with it later valued that spaghetti at $2.95; shoppers offered the same spaghetti for 50 cents valued it at $1.83.*** A cheap price makes the add-on look cheap. A free gift borrows the prestige of the full-price purchase. Pick a gift with high perceived value and low landed cost, set the threshold 20 to 30 percent above the current average order, and state it plainly.

Bundles. A bundle sells a solution, not an item: the teacher gift, the new-homeowner box, the first-fire-of-the-season kit. Pair a bestseller with a slower mover and price the bundle below the sum of its parts but above the average order. The customer sees a deal. The business moves two units, clears a laggard and raises order value. With 47 percent of shoppers preferring one meaningful gift over several small ones, a well-built bundle is that meaningful gift, pre-assembled.**

Tiered thresholds. Spend $100, get $15 off; spend $175, get $35 off. The effective discount at each step is 15 to 20 percent, but only on baskets that already cleared a higher bar, and it pulls the typical shopper up instead of marking everything down.

Loyalty early access. Give email and SMS subscribers 48 hours of first access to the best offer before the public sees it. The price did not change; the velvet rope did. Early access rewards the people most likely to buy again and turns the list itself into the thing being promoted in October.

Bonus gift cards. Buy a $100 gift card, get a $20 bonus card good from January 15 through March 31. The bonus costs nothing in December, and it brings a customer back during the slowest weeks of the year, when the store needs the traffic most.

Price anchoring. Lead with the premium option. A $240 gift set on the top shelf makes the $96 set look reasonable, and a good, better, best lineup tends to steer buyers toward the middle. Anchors must be honest. The FTC's Guides Against Deceptive Pricing treat an invented former price as deception, and a fake "compare at" number is the fastest way to turn a promotion into a regulator's case study.

Flexible payment. Buy now, pay later is a payment option, not a promotion, and shoppers use it. Adobe counted $20 billion in BNPL online spending during the 2025 season, up 9.8 percent, with a record $1.03 billion on Cyber Monday alone, and it forecasts $21.3 billion for 2026.¶,§ For a brand with orders above $100, "four payments of $28" can do the psychological work of a discount without touching the price. Merchant fees usually run higher than card fees, so model BNPL like any other cost of sale and feature it on bundles and gift sets, where baskets are biggest.

What is the strongest case for running a big Black Friday sale?

The strongest case is that discounts demonstrably move volume, customers now expect them, and for some businesses the extra volume is worth more than the margin surrendered. That case is real, and an honest plan should weigh it before rejecting it.

Start with the evidence. Adobe's 2025 recap credited strong discounts with driving resilient online demand and found that discounts pushed shoppers to trade up: the share of units sold for the most expensive goods rose 20 percent compared with the rest of the year, and 56 percent in electronics.¶ Deep discounts do not only attract bargain hunters. They also convert shoppers who were waiting for a reason, and sometimes they convert them to the premium tier.

Expectation matters too. When J.C. Penney scrapped most of its sales and coupons in 2012 under chief executive Ron Johnson in favor of everyday pricing, shoppers trained on coupons walked away, full-year revenue fell about 25 percent, from $17.26 billion to $12.98 billion, and Johnson was out after about 16 months.††† Customers who have been taught to wait for a sale will wait.

There are three situations where a discount is simply the right tool:

• Aged or seasonal inventory that will be worth less in January than the cost of carrying it, especially stock bought at inflated landed costs earlier in the year.

• New-customer acquisition for a business that knows its repeat rate and lifetime value, where a thin-margin first order buys a customer worth several more.

• Commodity categories where every competitor discounts, and standing at full price only signals that the store is not paying attention.

Franksgiving offers the same split decision. LaGuardia's survey found no clear benefit from the earlier Thanksgiving, but a later study by the National Retail Dry Goods Association reported that places using the early date did better than before, or better than places that kept the old one.* Both sides had data. The difference was who was counting. Black Friday discounts work the same way. They work for businesses with fat gross margins, proven repeat behavior or inventory that needs to leave. They punish businesses with thin margins and no plan to bring the discount buyer back.

The test is simple. Before running a sitewide discount, a business should be able to answer three questions with numbers. What is the break-even lift? What share of last year's discount buyers bought again at full price? What happens to returns? If those answers are unknown, the sale is a guess wearing a bow.

How much inventory should a small business buy for the holidays?

Less than instinct says on speculative items, and enough on proven sellers to never stock out. Small businesses are already leaning cautious: NFIB's September 2026 survey found 18 percent of owners cut inventories over the prior three months, while a net 2 percent plan to add stock.‡‡

Caution is rational. Landed costs are higher, borrowing costs are high enough that consumers cite them as a reason to skip big purchases, and sentiment sits near record lows.§§ But caution applied evenly is its own mistake. A stockout on a bestseller in the second week of December is the most expensive kind of empty shelf, because the customer who came for that item buys it somewhere else and may not come back.

The fix is to tier the catalog. A-items, the 20 or so products that drove most of last season's sales, get bought deep and protected with reorder points and a backup supplier. B-items get bought to last year's sell-through, adjusted for price increases. C-items, the speculative newcomers and the this-might-be-cute impulse buys, get bought shallow or sold on preorder. Bundles can carry B-items and C-items on the back of A-items, which is a far better exit plan than a January clearance rack.

Then put a carrying cost on the extra. If a business buys $40,000 of stock it does not sell until March and funds it on a credit line at 9 percent, that is about $900 in interest for the quarter, before storage, shrink, markdowns and the cash that could have gone to ads in January. A Tampa 3PL will happily store the overflow. It will also send an invoice every month the pallets sit there.

For brands that import, the timing is already set. Freight booked in October arrives in November, and anything ordered now for December is a bet on transit times. The practical move for the next 30 days is to stop buying speculative stock, confirm landed costs on everything already in transit and finish any price increases before Black Friday rather than during it. Raising prices in the middle of a promotion looks like a bait-and-switch. Raising them three weeks before looks like a price.

How can a service business make money on Black Friday?

Service businesses win the holiday season by selling future work today: gift cards, prepaid maintenance plans and packaged experiences. Those offers bring in December cash and fill the calendar from January through spring, which for most service businesses is the slow season.

The demand is there. Gift cards top the list of what shoppers want to receive, with 47 percent asking for them in NRF's 2026 survey.‡ Deloitte found 50 percent of shoppers plan to give an experience this year, up from 47 percent in 2025 and 39 percent in 2024.** An hour of detailing, a massage, a tasting menu, a pest-free spring: all of those are experiences, and all of them can be wrapped.

Consider a PE-backed HVAC platform in its second add-on. Each acquired brand has its own maintenance club, its own pricing and its own December lull. The holiday play is one standardized, giftable plan across every brand: two tune-ups for $179, sold as a gift for parents or a new homeowner. Sell 400 of them and the platform banks $71,600 in December and books 800 visits between March and October. If even 1 in 25 spring visits finds a 15-year-old system near the end of its life, 400 memberships become 16 replacement conversations that never touched an ad auction.

Professional services can play too, more quietly. A management consultancy can offer clients with unspent year-end budgets a prepaid first-quarter planning workshop. A two-partner estate planning firm in Clearwater can promote a December family-meeting consult, timed to the week relatives are actually in the same room. A Tampa 3PL can sell reserved peak-season overflow capacity, in advance and at a premium, to e-commerce brands that underestimated December.

Three rules make these offers work. Price them at full value and add a bonus instead of a discount: a free filter change, an extra 15 minutes, a second consult. Set redemption windows that land in the slow months. And capture both the buyer's and the recipient's contact information, because a gift card is not really a sale. It is an introduction to a new customer who has not met the business yet.

Is Small Business Saturday worth it for a small business?

Yes, if the business treats Small Business Saturday as a relationship event instead of a discount day. American Express's 2025 Shop Small research found 86 percent of consumers said they were likely to shop small during the holiday season, and 82 percent of small business owners said they had seen sales spike when content creators posted about them.‡‡‡

The best case study for Small Business Saturday is a movie about a department store. In Miracle on 34th Street, released in 1947, Edmund Gwenn plays Kris Kringle, hired as the Macy's Santa. When a shopper wants something Macy's does not carry, Kris sends the shopper to another store, including archrival Gimbels. Grateful customers send Macy's business soaring, Gimbels executives are driven nearly frantic, and the competing stores start racing to be known as the one with the kindest heart.§§§ Gwenn won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, and the film won Oscars for its story and screenplay.‖‖‖

Here is the detail that makes the story land. Federated Department Stores, the company Fred Lazarus Jr. built, later became Macy's Inc.† The man who tried to win the season by stretching the calendar built the company that now owns the store whose fictional Santa won it by earning trust. One plan needed an act of Congress. The other needed a Santa who told the truth.

Small businesses can play Kris Kringle in ways a big box cannot. The owner knows the regulars by name. The staff can say, "that one's not right for her, try this." A shop can send a customer down the street when it does not carry the thing, and the customer will remember who helped. Practical Small Business Saturday plays look like this:

• A shop-the-block passport with three to five neighboring businesses, stamped at each stop and entered into one shared drawing.

• A gift-wrap station and a gift-concierge hour, where staff build a gift for a specific person on a specific budget.

• One or two local creators invited for a morning walk-through, paid in early access instead of a fee.

• A gift with purchase rather than a markdown, so the day builds the brand instead of the bargain bin.

The goal is not the Saturday sale. The goal is the Saturday customer who comes back in February.

When do Facebook and Instagram ad costs go up before Black Friday?

Meta ad costs typically start climbing in late October and peak from late November into early December. Analysts at GeistM tracked Meta CPMs in the fourth quarter of 2025 rising 7 percent in the second half of October, 3 percent in early November, 11 percent in late November and another 11 percent in early December, before falling 10 percent after mid-December.¶¶¶

Chain those increases together and the cost of a thousand impressions rose about 27 percent from late October to early December. On a $5,000 budget, that is the difference between about 333,000 impressions at a $15 CPM and about 262,000 at $19.05. Same money, roughly 71,000 fewer people. Triple Whale's review of more than 33,000 online stores during Black Friday and Cyber Monday 2025 put the Meta CPM at $22.26, up about 7.8 percent from the year before, with Meta taking 67.6 percent of all tracked ad spend.****

The strategy follows from the math. Buy attention while it is cheap, and harvest it when it is expensive. Lazarus wanted more days to sell; the modern equivalent is buying the days before the auction gets crowded. October and early November ad dollars should build owned audiences, such as an email list, an SMS list and a notify-me list for the gift sets, rather than fund conversion campaigns fighting every national chain for the same impressions. Then, during Cyber Week, the business sells to people it already reached, through channels where the cost per message is close to zero. Text messaging requires clear consent, so the opt-in language deserves a lawyer's glance before launch.

An early-access list is the cleanest list-building offer: sign up and get first access to the holiday gift sets 48 hours before everyone else. It promises value without promising a discount, and it pre-sorts the list into people who actually intend to buy. Tocobaga's earlier piece on budget allocation, The Planes That Didn't Come Back, explains why the dollars that look least productive in October are often the ones holding up the December numbers.

There is also a new aisle in the store. Adobe recorded traffic to retail sites from generative AI tools up 693 percent during the 2025 season and forecasts another 130 percent increase in 2026, with the biggest jumps on Thanksgiving and Black Friday.¶,§ The base is still modest, but a shopper asking a chatbot for the best gift for a coffee snob under $75 gets product names, not ads. Tocobaga's guide to earning citations in AI answers, Phone a Friend, covers how a brand gets onto that shelf.

How should a small business plan for holiday returns?

Plan for roughly one in six holiday dollars to come back. NRF and Happy Returns expected 17 percent of 2025 holiday sales to be returned, part of $849.9 billion in returns for the year, or 15.8 percent of total retail sales.¶¶

Online is worse, with returns at 19.3 percent of sales, and NRF estimated that 9 percent of all returns are fraudulent. Meanwhile, 82 percent of consumers call free returns a major factor in deciding where to buy.¶¶ The return policy is part of the offer whether the business designs it that way or not.

Run the numbers for the hypothetical $4 million home-fragrance brand from the 25 percent off example. If its gift-with-purchase week produced $214,720 in sales and 17 percent comes back, about $36,500 in merchandise returns in January. Had the brand run the sitewide sale instead, it would have had 1,000 extra orders to process back through the same warehouse, each one already shipped at $9 and each one sold at a margin that could not absorb the trip.

A good holiday return policy for a small business does four things:

• Extends the window for gifts, so purchases from November 1 can be returned through January 31, which reassures gift givers without inviting abuse.

• Steers customers toward exchanges and store credit, with a small bonus for choosing credit, such as an extra $10 on a $50 return.

• Ships a gift receipt in every order by default, so recipients can exchange without seeing the price.

• States before checkout how the free gift is handled on a return, either kept by the customer or deducted at its stated value.

January returns are also a retention moment disguised as a cost. A recipient returning a gift is a new customer standing in the store or on the site with credit in hand. A business that treats that moment like a complaint desk loses the customer. A business that treats it like a fitting room keeps them.

What should a small business do in the 30 days before Black Friday?

With about a month left, the priority order is margin math first, offers second and media third. Here is the sequence Tocobaga uses with small retailers, e-commerce brands and service businesses heading into November 2026:

• By November 2: calculate contribution per order at full price and the break-even lift for any discount under consideration, using current landed costs.

• By November 4: choose the offer architecture, such as a gift with purchase or tiered threshold for the public, early access for the list and true markdowns only for aged inventory.

• By November 6: freeze speculative inventory buys, set reorder points on the top 20 sellers and finish any price increases before promotions begin.

• By November 9: launch the early-access list-building campaign on Meta and Google while CPMs sit below their late-November peak.

• By November 13: build bundles and gift sets around bestsellers, photograph them and load them as their own products.

• By November 16: write the email and SMS calendar for November 20 through December 21, including shipping cutoffs and gift-card reminders.

• By November 20: publish the holiday return policy, add gift receipts to fulfillment and set up the January bonus gift cards.

• November 24 to 25: open early access to the list, 48 hours before the public offer.

• November 26 to 30: shift paid spend to retargeting warm audiences and let owned channels carry the weekend.

• December 1 onward: pivot to gift cards, local pickup and last-shipping-day messages, then plan the January win-back.

Some owners will run that list alone, and they should. For the ones who want a second set of eyes on the math, Tocobaga does this work for small and mid-sized businesses every season, with 1,000+ businesses advised, 600+ integrated campaigns executed and 1,000,000+ emails deployed. The model is deliberately boring in the right places: flat fees, never a percentage of ad spend, no auto-renewing contracts, and the client owns every account, list and asset, with no Tocobaga name stamped on the client's website. Tocobaga is not for everyone, and like a certain department store Santa, it will say so and point an owner to a better fit when there is one. An intro call is the place to start, at (813) 534-1261 or hello@solvinghow.com through SolvingHow.com.

What did Franksgiving teach retailers about the holiday calendar?

Franksgiving taught retailers that adding days to the season does not add profit to the season. Roosevelt gave the merchants an extra week, and the evidence that it helped was thin enough that he called the experiment a failure within two years.*

The urge never went away. It just got cheaper to act on. In 1939, stretching the season took a President, a proclamation and a standoff with more than half the governors. In 2026 it takes a discount code and an email on November 2. Every big retailer will stretch the season again this year, with discounts climbing from 14 percent in early November to 30 percent in Cyber Week.§ A small business cannot out-stretch them. It can out-plan them.

Planning means knowing the contribution on every order before choosing an offer. It means buying attention in October and spending it in November. It means bundles and free gifts instead of a price tag rewritten in the customer's memory, inventory bought deep on proven sellers and shallow on hope, gift cards that bring a new customer through the door in February, and a return policy that turns January into a second season.

And it means remembering who actually won the argument. Lazarus and the retailers got their extra week in 1939 and spent the next two years unable to prove it mattered. Eight years later, a fictional Santa at Macy's won Christmas by sending a customer to Gimbels. Congress can move Thanksgiving. Only trust moves a customer.

When does Black Friday 2026 start?

Black Friday 2026 is Friday, November 27, the day after Thanksgiving on November 26. Small Business Saturday follows on November 28 and Cyber Monday on November 30. In practice, deals start much earlier: Adobe expects online discounts of up to 14 percent in early November and 21 percent just before Thanksgiving, peaking near 30 percent during Cyber Week. NRF found 43 percent of holiday shoppers planned to start before November.

What is the NRF holiday forecast for 2026?

The National Retail Federation forecasts that November and December 2026 retail sales will grow 4.2 percent to $1.013 trillion, a projection released October 15, 2026. NRF chief economist Mark Mathews expects nearly half of that growth to come from real spending and the rest from higher prices. For context, 2025 holiday sales grew 3.1 percent to $972 billion, below NRF's forecast range of 3.7 to 4.2 percent.

Is a free gift better than a discount?

Often, yes. Research published in the Journal of Consumer Research found shoppers valued a free add-on item more than the same item offered at a token price, because a free gift borrows the prestige of the full-price purchase while a cheap price signals low quality. For the business, a gift with purchase costs only the gift's landed cost and can raise order value, while a sitewide discount cuts the margin on every single order.

How can a small business compete with big retailers on Black Friday?

By refusing to fight on price. Big retailers will run discounts near 30 percent in electronics and toys, backed by purchasing power no small business can match. Small businesses win on curation, service and trust: gift sets built for specific people, personal recommendations, gift wrapping, easy exchanges and early access for loyal customers. Building an email and SMS list before ad costs rise in late November also lets a small brand sell without outbidding national chains.

What is a good holiday return policy for a small business?

A strong holiday policy extends the return window for gifts, for example letting November purchases be returned through January 31, includes gift receipts by default, steers customers toward exchanges or store credit with a small bonus and explains how free gifts are handled. NRF expected 17 percent of 2025 holiday sales to be returned, and 82 percent of consumers say free returns are a major factor in deciding where to shop.

Do gift cards count as revenue for a small business?

Not right away. Under standard accounting, a gift card sale is recorded as a liability when sold and becomes revenue when the card is redeemed, even though the cash arrives immediately. That timing makes gift cards valuable for service businesses with slow first quarters: December cash comes in, and redemption visits fill January through March. Owners should confirm the treatment, and any state rules on expiration dates, with their accountant.

Should a small business raise prices before the holidays?

If costs have risen, the cleaner move is to raise prices before holiday promotions begin, not during them. NFIB's September 2026 survey found a net 31 percent of small business owners planned to raise prices within three months. A change made three weeks before Black Friday reads as the new price; a change made mid-promotion reads as a bait-and-switch. Pairing an increase with added value, such as a bundle or free gift, softens the reaction.

When should a small business start holiday marketing?

List building should start in October or the first week of November, while ad costs are lower. Based on GeistM's half-month tracking, Meta CPMs climbed roughly 27 percent from late October to early December in 2025. The most efficient plan uses cheaper early impressions to grow email and SMS lists, gives subscribers early access before Thanksgiving and relies on those owned channels during Cyber Week, when paid auctions are most crowded.

Sources

*

Chessman, G. Wallace. "Thanksgiving: Another FDR Experiment." Prologue (National Archives), Fall 1990. Documents FDR's August 14, 1939 announcement at Campobello, the five-Thursday November that put the holiday on November 30, Lowell Mellett's June 26 memo on Ohio retailers, Lew Hahn's August 4 letter to Harry Hopkins estimating 12 to 15 percent of annual retail trade fell between Thanksgiving and Christmas, the Gallup poll showing 62 percent opposed, Texas, Colorado and Mississippi observing both dates, LaGuardia's survey of 2,000 stores (203 replies: 76 for, 94 against, 33 no opinion), the 22-city survey, NRDGA's contrary study, FDR's May 20, 1941 statement that the experiment "did not work" and the December 26, 1941 signing of the fourth-Thursday law. https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/fdr-thanksgiving-experiment

†

Sen, Indrani. "Fortune Archives: The Jewish Mogul Who Shaped the Christmas Shopping Season." Fortune, November 23, 2025. Credits Fred Lazarus Jr. of Federated Department Stores with convincing Roosevelt, notes the 24 shopping days a November 30 Thanksgiving would have left, the "Franksgiving" nickname, Federated's $300 million size by 1948 and later rebirth as Macy's Inc., the 27-day 2025 season and holidays at almost a fifth of annual retail sales and about a third for department stores. https://fortune.com/2025/11/23/fortune-archives-jewish-mogul-shaped-christmas-shopping-season/

‡

National Retail Federation. "Winter Holidays: Holiday Data and Trends." NRF, October 15, 2026. Forecasts November and December 2026 retail sales of $1.013 trillion, up 4.2 percent; 325,000 to 375,000 seasonal hires; 43 percent of shoppers starting before November; 56 percent saying the economy will affect their spending; 47 percent wanting gift cards. https://nrf.com/research-insights/holiday-data-and-trends/winter-holidays

§

Adobe. "Adobe: U.S. Holiday Shopping Season to Hit Record $275.1 Billion Online, Rising 6.7% YoY." Adobe Digital Insights, September 28, 2026. Forecasts $275.1 billion in online spending, Cyber Week at $47.5 billion (17.3 percent of the season), Cyber Monday at $15.1 billion, Black Friday at $12.9 billion, discounts of up to 14 percent in early November, 21 percent before Thanksgiving, 30 percent in Cyber Week and 10 to 15 percent in December, category peaks of 30 percent in electronics, 29 percent in toys and 23 percent in apparel and computers, $21.3 billion in BNPL and AI-referred retail traffic up 130 percent. https://news.adobe.com/news/downloads/pdfs/2026/09/adi-holiday-forecast-release-9-28.pdf

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James, Dani. "NRF Forecasts 4.2% Holiday Sales Growth, Muted Seasonal Hiring." Retail Dive, October 19, 2026. Reports that 2025 holiday sales grew 3.1 percent to $972 billion, below NRF's 3.7 to 4.2 percent forecast, and chief economist Mark Mathews' view that nearly half of 2026 nominal growth is real spending, that diesel and memory-chip prices pressure electronics and that hiring reflects a "low hire, low fire" market. https://www.retaildive.com/news/nrf-forecasts-2026-holiday-sales-growth-seasonal-hiring/833239/

¶

Adobe Digital Insights. "2025 Holiday Shopping Season" (press release). Adobe, January 7, 2026. Reports $257.8 billion in 2025 online holiday spending, up 6.8 percent, Cyber Monday at $14.25 billion, $20 billion in BNPL spending, up 9.8 percent, a record $1.03 billion in BNPL on Cyber Monday, a 20 percent rise in the share of units sold for the most expensive goods (56 percent in electronics) and generative AI traffic to retail sites up 693.4 percent. https://news.adobe.com/news/downloads/pdfs/2026/01/010726-2025-holiday-shopping-season.pdf

**

Deloitte. "Deloitte: Holiday Spending Set to Increase 4% While Shoppers Focus on Value." Deloitte press release, October 15, 2026. Survey of 4,000 consumers finds expected spending of $1,654, up 4 percent from $1,595, retail goods up 10 percent to $988, activities down 4 percent to $666, 38 percent value seekers expecting to spend 12 percent more than others, 47 percent preferring one meaningful gift and 50 percent planning to gift experiences, up from 47 percent in 2025 and 39 percent in 2024. https://www.deloitte.com/us/en/about/press-room/deloitte-holiday-spending-set-to-increase.html

††

Azpurua, Ana Elena. "Tariffs Leave Consumers and Companies Splitting the Tab." Harvard Business School Working Knowledge, April 27, 2026. Alberto Cavallo's team tracked nearly 360,000 products at five major U.S. retailers and found up to 43 percent of the tariff burden passed to consumers in the first seven months, with CPI inflation at 3.3 percent in the year through March 2026. https://www.library.hbs.edu/working-knowledge/tariffs-leave-consumers-and-companies-splitting-the-tab

‡‡

NFIB. "Small Business Economic Trends, September 2026." NFIB, October 2026. A net 31 percent of owners plan price increases (historical average 22), a net 31 percent raised prices (average 14), 20 percent cite inflation as their top problem (average 7), 18 percent reduced inventories and a net 2 percent plan to add inventory. https://www.nfib.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/NFIB-SBET-Report-September-2026.pdf

§§

TheStreet Pro. "Consumers' View of Economic Conditions Hits All-Time Low." TheStreet, October 9, 2026. Reports the preliminary October 2026 University of Michigan sentiment index at 46.3, 1.5 points above the all-time low of 44.8 set in May, current conditions at a record low of 44.7, Joanne Hsu's comment that "Frustration over cost-of-living continues to mount" and that durable buying conditions fell amid high prices and borrowing costs, and that only about 31 percent expect to spend as usual while just over half plan to cut back. https://pro.thestreet.com/market-commentary/consumers-view-of-economic-conditions-hits-all-time-low

‖‖

Byers, John W., Michael Mitzenmacher, and Georgios Zervas. "The Groupon Effect on Yelp Ratings: A Root Cause Analysis." arXiv:1202.2369 (ACM EC 2012), February 2012. Across 16,692 Groupon deals in 20 U.S. metros, reviews by Groupon users averaged 3.27 stars versus 3.73 for others, with deal buyers more often experimenting with an unfamiliar business. https://www.arxiv.org/pdf/1202.2369

¶¶

National Retail Federation. "Consumers Expected to Return Nearly $850 Billion in Merchandise in 2025." NRF, October 15, 2025. NRF and Happy Returns project $849.9 billion in 2025 returns (15.8 percent of sales), 17 percent of holiday sales returned, a 19.3 percent online return rate, 9 percent of returns fraudulent and 82 percent of consumers calling free returns a major consideration. https://nrf.com/media-center/press-releases/consumers-expected-to-return-nearly-850-billion-in-merchandise-in-2025

***

Phys.org. "When Do Consumers Think a Freebie Is More Valuable Than a Discounted Product?" Phys.org, August 20, 2013. Summarizes Palmeira and Srivastava in the Journal of Consumer Research: shoppers buying an $8.95 organic tomato sauce valued free spaghetti at $2.95 versus $1.83 when the spaghetti was offered for 50 cents. https://phys.org/news/2013-08-consumers-freebie-valuable-discounted-product.html

†††

D'Innocenzio, Anne. "JC Penney Ousts CEO Ron Johnson." Associated Press via MPR News, April 8, 2013. Johnson dropped most promotions, including coupons, for everyday low prices; full-year revenue fell about 25 percent, from $17.26 billion to $12.98 billion; he was removed after about 16 months. https://www.mprnews.org/story/2013/04/08/jc-penney-ousts-ceo-ron-johnson

‡‡‡

American Express. "American Express, Founder of Small Business Saturday, Expands Small Business Support with New $5 Million Shop Small Grants Program." Business Wire, November 11, 2025. The 2025 Shop Small Impact Study found 86 percent of consumers likely to shop small this holiday season and 82 percent of small business owners seeing sales spike when content creators post about them. https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20251111146438/en/American-Express-Founder-of-Small-Business-Saturday%C2%AE-Expands-Small-Business-Support-with-New-5-Million-Shop-Small-Grants-Program

§§§

The New Republic. "TNR Film Classics: 'Miracle on 34th Street' (June 2, 1947)." The New Republic, June 2, 1947, republished December 19, 2011. Describes Kris Kringle, hired as Macy's Santa, sending shoppers to other stores, grateful customers sending Macy's business soaring, Gimbels executives driven nearly frantic and stores competing to be known for the kindest heart. https://newrepublic.com/article/98703/tnr-film-classics-miracle-34th-street-june-2-1947

‖‖‖

Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. "Miracle on 34th Street 70th Anniversary." Oscars.org, accessed October 26, 2026. Confirms the 1947 release, George Seaton as director, Edmund Gwenn's Best Supporting Actor win and the film's Oscars for story and screenplay. https://www.oscars.org/events/miracle-34th-street-70th-anniversary

¶¶¶

GeistM. "Q4 2025 Digital Ad Rate Trends: Insights to Maximize Your Year-End Campaigns." GeistM, January 13, 2026. Reports half-month Meta CPM changes in Q4 2025: up 7 percent in late October, 3 percent in early November, 11 percent in late November and 11 percent in early December, then down 10 percent in late December. https://geistm.com/blog/meta-rate-trends-q4-2025/

****

Kordys, Emily. "Black Friday Facebook Ads: Data, Strategies, and AI Automations for 2026." Triple Whale, accessed October 26, 2026. Triple Whale's BFCM 2025 data across more than 33,000 shops shows Meta CPM up about 7.8 percent to $22.26 and Meta at 67.6 percent of tracked ad spend. https://www.triplewhale.com/blog/facebook-ads-bfcm.md