Are you ready for Black Friday and looking for the best deals?
If so, do you know when is the best time to go shopping, even during the pandemic?
Are you a shopper? If so, you may question when the most Black Friday deals come out? At what time do people look for Black Friday deals the most? When is the least crowded day during the week of Black Friday to go shopping (even during the coronavirus)?
Next week is the week of Thanksgiving and provides many great deals for the savvy shopper. There are many great times to shop including Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and even some of the surrounding days. The annual holiday survey poll from Blackfriday.com states that more than 5,000 U.S. adults via Google Surveys and found that roughly 1 in 5 plans to shop during this crucial time span. Black Friday is the biggest shopping day of Cyber Week, with 61% of Cyber Week shoppers saying they will shop on that day.
However, as we know this year has been a rough year, especially due to the current situation with the virus. During this pandemic, many try to avoid crowded areas. There are questions surrounding how safe it is to shop during the coronavirus. Not only is wearing a mask required, but we are advised to be around as few people as possible. The question remains how can we go shopping in fewer crowds during this holiday week? This study might be helpful for making a decision when the fewest people decide to go shopping during cyber week. The posts collected from the past 3 years on social media mentioned Black Friday and might show one’s interest or decision making to go shopping.
Data collection
One of the biggest online community names “Reddit” was selected as the data source since there are over 330 million Reddit users called Redditors and over 138,000 active categories or communities called Subreddits. Thus this data source could have a large number of users that express their interest or decision-making on whether when they plan to go shopping during the cyber week. I have collected 939 post’s submission data from the past 3 years (from 2017 — November 13, 2020) on the blackfriday subreddit (r/blackfriday) with the Python Reddit API Wrapper (PRAW). I have focused on the post’s submission time by using the script in the figure below, as I will study the time period of when people look for the black Friday deals or mentioned it on Subreddit the most in the past.
Data manipulation
In order to study the time period of the post’s submission from the data set, I have cleaned, formated, counted data, and categorized them as a column per day as shown in the figure below.
Data analysis
I have used Microsoft Excel and R Studio to analyze the data. First, I have imported the dataset in CSV files to R Studio with the import functionality settings as shown in the figure below.
The dataset object named Assignment5 was created by R which contains the spreadsheet data. Then, the first thing in order to plot the time-series data is converting the date data into the general format by calling the format function and assigning the new format data in a new variable object; rdate<-as.Date(Assignment.5$Date,”%m/%/d%y”) and fixed data structure with the fix(rdate) function. Now I have the data object ready to plot as shown in the figure below.
Next, to see the graph of time-series data, I have plotted the object value (rdate) by using plot(), box(), and axis() functions as shown in the figure below.
Now I have the graph of the number of posts related to Black Friday versus the period of time from 2017–2020 as shown in the picture below.
The graph shows the number of posts related to Black Friday evolved from 2017 through 2020. We can see the number of posts in November 2017, during October-December 2018, during October-December 2019, and during October-November 2020 grew higher than another period of time. Especially during November of the past three years, the number of posts in the last three years has extraordinarily increased. This is consistent with the BlackFriday poll which claims the most shoppers (68%) look for the Black Friday deals and plan to shop during this period of time (November of the year).
The temporal granularity analysis
The goal is to extract when the least amount of people usually decide to go shopping during the cyber week. Thus, we need to focus within that subgroup (per week) for additional cyber week specific insights. The graph below visualizes the fewest number of Black Friday attention posts during the cyber week is on Sunday before Cyber Monday and the day after Cyber Monday, which in 2017 has the fewest number of posts among them. The next period of time is the day before Thanksgiving Day and Saturday after Black Friday. Next is Thanksgiving Day which in 2017 has the fewest posts among them respectively.
The second most number of posts is Cyber Monday which in 2019 has the most number of posts. The day people pay attention to Black Friday the most is Black Friday which reached over 100 posts in 2018 and over 75 posts in 2017 and 2019. Apparently, the majority of Redditors pay attention to Black Friday on Black Friday. The day that Redditors advert to Black Friday the least during the cyber week is the day after Cyber Monday.
The exploratory and explanatory data analysis
As Thanksgiving, Black Friday, and Cyber Monday are all in November of every year, so of course, it makes sense that this month will be a popular time to look for deals or plan to go shopping. The bar chart below visualizes the most popular day on average of 3 years is Black Friday which has almost reached 400 posts or 37.32% of all the posts during cyber week. The second most popular day is Cyber Monday which is 23.8% of all the posts. Thanksgiving Day has 20% of the posts from Redditors. Next, is the day before Thanksgiving which has 9.44%, and Saturday after Black Friday which contains 5.63% of posts. The second popular day is Sunday before Cyber Monday which only has 1.97% of mentioned posts. The least popular day during Cyber week is the day after Cyber Monday. There are only 1.83% of posts mentioned on this day.
This study focuses on Black Friday attention posts on Reddit from the past three years to study whether the fewest people advert to shop for Black Friday deals during the cyber week for the past three years. After I study the post’s submission time on the r/blackfriday subreddit, the results show the lowest majority of Redditor’s interest in Black Friday during Cyber week is the day after Cyber Monday and the majority is Black Friday.
Potential biases and ethical concerns
Some biases of this study are this year coronavirus had an effect on the number of shoppers going out on Black Friday compared to previous years. Ethical concerns include potentially exposing the family to coronavirus while going shopping in-store. Not spending as much time with family members during the time spent shopping in stores or online. Overspending can become an ethical dilemma if you do not monitor your budget.
Discussion of the limitations
Some limitations include measuring users’ shopping habits for a short time period over multiple years. Other limitations include the data was collected from r/blackfriday subreddit and Python Reddit API Wrapper (PRAW) which limits only 1,000 rows of data. Also, this study analyzes the data from 2017 until November 13, 2020, which excludes the second half of November 2020.
