Black Friday (shopping) Prime Days taking place in 2016 and 2017. Other companies followed with "Black Friday in July" deals which were as good as, or better than, those in November. For many years, retailers pushed opening times on Black Friday earlier and earlier, eventually reaching midnight, before opening on the evening of Thanksgiving. In 2009, Kmart opened at 7:00 a.m. on Thanksgiving, in order to allow shoppers to avoid Black Friday traffic and return home in time for dinner with their families. Two years later, a number of retailers began opening at 8:00 or 9:00 p.m., on what became derisively known as
Black Friday (shopping) media usually give heavy play to reports of Black Friday shopping and their implications for the commercial success of the Christmas shopping season, but the relationship between Black Friday sales and retail sales for the full holiday season is quite weak and may even be negative. On April 23, 2014, ".blackfriday" joined a growing list of ICANN top-level domains (such as—traditionally—.com, .net, and .org). In 2015, Neil Stern of McMillan Doolittle said, "Black Friday is quickly losing its meaning on many fronts," because many stores opened on Thanksgiving, and a lot of sales started even earlier than that. Online shopping