Black Friday Is Not a One-Day Shopping Event. It’s at Least Three.
The Cyber 5, the five days from Thanksgiving and Black Friday through Cyber Monday, gets planned like a single event: one flight, one message, one promotional push aimed at everybody at once.
InMarket’s 2026 Holiday Shopping InSights report, drawn from a survey of 1,983 US adults fielded with Kantar alongside commerce and visitation data covering June 2025 through February 2026, shows that treating it that way leaves a lot on the table. Those five days mean very different things depending on how old your shopper is and what category you sell.
Split one: the Cyber 5 is a generational event
60% of Gen Z shoppers name Black Friday as the deal event they rely on most. Among Boomers+, that figure is 27%, less than half the rate.
Flip the question, and the contrast gets sharper. 47% of Boomers+ shop deals as they come, with no event attached, against just 20% of Gen Z. Across all shoppers, 42% rely on Black Friday and 33% hunt continuously.
Most shoppers aren’t organizing their season around late November. For a brand with a young core audience, the Cyber 5 is genuinely the concentrated moment the plan assumes it is. For a brand skewing older, building the quarter around it means over-indexing on a weekend most shoppers treat as one option among many.
The spending picture points in the same direction. 49% of Gen Z and 36% of Millennials expect to spend more than last year, against 17% of Gen X and 12% of Boomers+. Gen Z is growing its holiday budget roughly four times faster than the oldest cohort and concentrating that growth into fewer moments, with Black Friday chief among them.
The practical move is to split the value plan by age. Under 45, sell the Cyber 5 hard: exclusive deals, bundles, bonuses, the whole craze. Over 45, stay always on, because that shopper isn’t waiting for the fourth Friday in November to act.
Split two: the Cyber 5 is a category event
The visitation data draws an even harder line.
Apparel and department stores really do peak around Black Friday. Gap, Old Navy, American Eagle, lululemon, Kate Spade, and Victoria’s Secret all hit their highest in-store visitation the week of November 24, alongside Macy’s, JCPenney, and Best Buy. For brands in those categories, the standard plan targets the right week.
Most retailers are not in those categories. Eight of the ten largest big-box, discount, and specialty retailers, including Walmart, Target, Costco, Sam’s Club, Dollar Tree, T.J. Maxx, Marshalls, and Ross, did not peak until the week of December 15, the week we call the Final Dash. For that group, Black Friday is a moment but not the moment.
If your product sits on a shelf at Walmart or Target, your shopper’s peak arrives roughly three weeks after the point your media plan probably treats as the finish line.
Category demand tells you where to aim the promotional weight. Clothing is the top planned purchase at 65%, followed by gift cards at 57%, toys and games at 46%, electronics at 38%, and beauty at 31%. Black Friday promotions should concentrate on the gifting categories that actually peak that week, with gift cards positioned as an easy add-on to any of them.
Split three: the same shopper behaves differently across channels
77% of holiday shoppers plan to shop physical stores, still the widest-reach channel in the data and still growing. 70% plan to shop online marketplaces like Amazon, 46% plan to shop retailer websites, and 35% expect to use buy online, pickup in-store.
These channels are additive, not substitutive. The average shopper uses more than one, often for a single purchase. Around half of younger shoppers—51% of Millennials and 49% of Gen Z—plan to use AI this season, mostly for price comparison and deal hunting, adding another step to a journey that already has several.
A Cyber 5 plan that treats online and in-store as separate campaigns for separate people plans for an audience that doesn’t exist.
What to do with three splits and five days
The instinct is to build one bigger Black Friday plan across the full Cyber 5. The better move is to work out which split applies to you, then let that decide where the weight goes.
If you are apparel, department store, or electronics: the week is genuinely yours. Concentrate. Your younger audience is over-indexed on this exact moment and growing its budget faster than anyone else. Lean into deal framing and make the store trip easy.
If you are big-box, discount, specialty, or CPG: be present, but hold meaningful budget for mid-December, when your shopper actually shows up in the largest numbers.
If your audience skews over 45: run always-on value rather than a spike. Nearly half of that group is buying deals as they surface, and a plan that goes quiet in early December misses them entirely.
Either way: plan the five days as multi-channel by default. In-store reach and online comparison are two touchpoints on one shopper’s path, and the brands that win the weekend are present at both.
Cyber 5 is still one of the quarter’s most valuable stretches. It’s not one event, and it is not the same event for everyone.
Category-level purchase timing, generational deal behavior, and channel data are all in InMarket’s 2026 Holiday Shopping InSights report.