Holiday deals in October? Amazon, Target, Walmart hope you’ll take the bait

The holiday creep is coming even earlier this year. It may only be October, but retailers are jumping in on the too-early holiday deals, featuring Black Friday discounts more than six weeks before the famous shopping day.

The push is sparked in part by Amazon Prime’s new Early Access sale, where the company says Prime members can kick off the holiday shopping season early with this Prime Day sequel. Target’s response is a Black Friday extravaganza that started this week. Walmart is also sporting holiday rollbacks for the week.

But it’s not all about competition. This year, a major issue for retailers is an overwhelming excess of inventory plaguing chains. Target and others previously filled warehouses based on shopper’s COVID-19 spending habits, where people poured money into home goods and electronics. But as the pandemic loosened its grip, consumer spending habits changed to services and travel and retailers were left holding the bag.

That’s why Adobe said discounts will hit record highs this season as stores try to offload. According to their research, shoppers could see discounts upwards of 32% this year, far higher than 2021 levels. For instance, computers could be marked down by 32% while last year’s markdowns only touched 10%.

Despite the October holiday shopping push, though, Adobe said the steepest holiday sales will likely still happen between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday. But because of early discounts and inflation, they predict the actual holiday shopping season – November and December – will grow at the slowest pace since at least 2015, when Adobe started keeping track.

“The shape of the holiday season will look different this year, with early discounting in October pulling up spend that would have occurred around Cyber Week,” said Patrick Brown, vice president of growth marketing and insights at Adobe.

Adobe forecasts online sales will hit $209.7 billion this year, up 2.5% from the year prior, compared with last year’s 8.6% growth year over year.