Years-old video of empty store on Black Friday was filmed in London, not the US
Cards that read “Black Friday 60% off original price” top racks of children’s clothes during Black Friday shopping at Macy’s in Fashion Centre at Pentagon City in Arlington, Va., Friday, Nov. 25, 2022. Social media users are misrepresenting a years-old video of an empty store on Black Friday to blame President Joe Biden for the size of this year’s in-person crowds. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)
CLAIM: A video of only one shopper turning up for a Black Friday sale this year shows how President Joe Biden’s economic policies have negatively impacted consumer spending in the U.S.
AP’S ASSESSMENT: False. The video was filmed in London and in 2017, prior to Biden’s presidency.
THE FACTS: Social media users are misrepresenting an old video from the U.K. to blame Biden for the size of in-person crowds during Friday’s traditional holiday shopping hoopla.
The video, posted to Instagram, shows a woman opening the doors to an electronics store decorated with posters advertising a “black tag” sale, to find that only one man has come to shop. The man then walks in calmly amid waiting journalists.
“The ‘swarm’ of Black Friday shoppers in Biden’s economy,” reads a caption on the video.
But the footage is years-old and was not even filmed in the U.S.
It was shot by a BBC journalist in November 2017 — while Donald Trump was president — in London at a Black Friday sale hosted by electronics retailer Currys PC World, now known simply as Currys. Local media outlets reported at the time on the man’s solo shopping experience at the Oxford Street store.
There are also clues in the video that it is not from the U.S. — one of London’s red double-decker buses passes by for a few seconds.
It is true that Black Friday in the U.S. is no longer characterized by the crowd-filled mayhem at brick-and-mortar stores and shopping centers that it once was, although retail data doesn’t suggest that crowds shrunk dramatically this year.
RetailNext, which measures real-time foot traffic in stores, reported a 2.1% increase on Friday in comparison to last year. Sensormatic Solutions, which also tracks store traffic, reported a 4.6% jump.
But Mastercard SpendingPulse found that in-store purchases this year were up just 1.1%. Those numbers are not adjusted for inflation, which means that real sales in-stores could have dipped due to high prices, The Associated Press reported.
More importantly, people are now just shopping at different times and in different ways than they did a decade ago.
Namely, consumers are buying more online, according to Barbara Stewart, a professor of global retailing and consumer science at the University of Houston.
“So if we buy more online, we do it even on Thanksgiving Day rather than getting up in the morning at 4 o’clock and standing in line,” she said.
Stewart added that retailers have also begun offering seasonal deals for longer periods of time, meaning that peaks like Black Friday or Cyber Monday “become a little less intense.”
Online spending on Black Friday generated approximately $9.8 billion in revenue this year, according to Adobe Analytics. That’s an increase of about 7.5% from 2022. Total online spending during the holiday season is expected to grow by 4.8% this year, coming in at $221.8 billion.
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This is part of AP’s effort to address widely shared misinformation, including work with outside companies and organizations to add factual context to misleading content that is circulating online. Learn more about fact-checking at AP.