Amazon put a new date on the calendar last week. No it’s not Prime Day. But it has told its sellers that “Black Friday” deals will start on Monday, Oct. 26, leaving the rest of the retail world to read the tea leaves on Amazon’s Q4 plans.
According to Tamebay, an Amazon seller news site, Amazon Early Black Friday Deals will start and run through Nov. 19. There will be three weeks of Amazon Early Black Friday Deals with different products on special offer each week. The traditional “Black Friday” falls on Nov. 27 this year; Cyber Monday is Nov. 30.
“This means that Amazon will pretty much have sales events running for two entire months. We’re still expecting Prime Day to fall in the first week of October and barely a three weeks later the Amazon Early Black Friday Deals will kick off,” says Tamebay.
The site also reports that Early Black Friday Deals will be available to all consumers, not just Prime Members or consumers who sign up for Prime subscriptions and video. It could be that Amazon is using the month of October (and early Black Friday deals) as much as a revenue generator for itself as for its sellers. Remember Amazon’s stated corporate mission: “Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking.”
Customer obsession usually applies to the end shopper. Here it may mean another set of customers and that’s its independent sellers. Now that it knows where Walmart’s subscription service, Walmart+ has netted out (it’s set for a Sept. 15 launch) it could be that Amazon feels safe enough in its competitive posture and its level of Prime subscriptions to let those subscriptions ride for the holiday season. Instead, it’s eating up the calendar where it sees competitive advantages for its sellers. Creating its own series of Black Fridays gives those independent sellers a chance to grab business before the Etsys, Shopifys and large-scale retailers put a stake in the ground for the holiday season.
While Tamebay expects Prime Day to be sometime during the first week of October, there’s still an argument that says it could be postponed further. Amazon is running out of time to make its Prime Day announcement. The 2019 date was July 16. The shopping holiday was postponed this year due to the pandemic and the shipping difficulties it presented. If it doesn’t make an announcement on Prime Day this week or at the latest next week, it loses valuable promotional time.
If Prime Day is indeed announced for Oct. 5, as rumored, it will essentially kick off the retail holiday season. Walmart, Target, Best Buy, Costco, Macy’s and Nordstrom have already committed to starting the season in early October this year.
As David Abbou, content manager at eCommerce solution company Namogoo, told Footwear News, “Because Amazon is such a dominant player in the industry, by coming out with their Prime Day promotions in October, that’s going to be competing for the holiday spending budgets of many consumers.”
The U.S. Treasury Secretary says a new government cost-cutting effort has found $50 billion in savings.
Speaking to Fox News Tuesday (Feb. 18) evening, Scott Bessent said the work by the “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE), a group created by executive order last month, could ultimately lead to “several percent of GDP that we are saving.”
The secretary added that the public doesn’t “have to be concerned about any of this,” in reference to attempts by the Elon Musk-connected team to access taxpayer data, leading Democratic lawmakers to raise concerns about privacy.
At the Internal Revenue Service, Bessent said, there’s one member of the DOGE team “looking at an outdated IT system, that’s all they’re doing.”
Bessent said two people at Treasury had “read only access” to the payments systems, meaning they don’t have the ability to make any changes. “There are very strict guardrails around them,” he said.
The $50 billion figure is slightly lower than the $55 billion in savings DOGE claims to have found so far. However, a report from Bloomberg News Wednesday (Feb. 19) notes that while DOGE says it has saved $55 billion, its website accounts for just $16.6 billion.
That site also includes an error, the report added, mislabeling an $8 million contract as $8 billion, reducing the amount of the group’s itemized savings by nearly half.
DOGE’s efforts have helped bring about hundreds of thousands of government layoffs, some of which have been rescinded as departments realized they were missing crucial workers.
For example, the mass firings led to the dismissal of a team in the U.S. Department of Agriculture working on the government’s response to the avian flu. The department has said it is now trying to reverse the firings.
In another incident last week, the National Nuclear Security Administration rescinded firings for employees responsible for monitoring the nation’s nuclear stockpile, only to discover it had no way of getting in touch with said employees.
The idea for DOGE was first floated last year, with President Donald Trump announcing that Musk would lead the project. However, the administration has since said that Musk was an advisor to the White House, and not in charge of the department.
In a recent interview with PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster, Amias Gerety, a Treasury official for the Obama administration, warned of the consequences if DOGE’s efforts to access payment systems created uncertainty.
“If there’s one phrase that dominates discussions about the Treasury’s role in the nation’s finances, it’s ‘full faith and credit,’” Gerety said.
“The full faith and credit of the U.S. government should not be impeached. It’s literally in the [Constitution]. If you’re a bank, if you’re an investor, if you’re a government contractor, if you’re a retiree receiving Social Security — you have to ask, will my payments go through? That uncertainty should be felt around the world.”