Black Friday has long been marketed as the apex of consumer bargain-hunting, a day when prices supposedly collapse to their lowest levels and households can maximize purchasing power. But in recent years, including here in Kenya, the economic reality beneath the marketing spectacle tells a very different story. Data, consumer-behaviour trends, and retailer pricing strategies increasingly point to a phenomenon economists call discount illusion where perceived savings exceed actual savings.
A Kenyan consumer-awareness piece directly questioned whether Black Friday and Black November promotions truly offer value. According to the report, many local retailers inflate prices before the sale period, only to “slash” them later, creating the illusion of a substantial discount. This tactic, common in price-anchoring strategies, manipulates the reference price, the benchmark against which consumers judge whether a deal seems attractive. By elevating the reference price, retailers make ordinary prices appear like extraordinary bargains. This practice reduces genuine consumer surplus while preserving retailer margins.
The Kenyan market also reflects broader global trends highlighted by international watchdogs. For example, Which?, a UK-based consumer organisation, tracked 175 products for a full year and found that none hit their lowest price on Black Friday. While the data is not Kenyan-specific, it reinforces a similar behavioural pattern: Black Friday has become more about price signalling than real price competition.
From a microeconomic perspective, retailers appear to be leveraging information asymmetry. They know the true historical prices, while most consumers do not. In such an environment, firms possess the incentive to distort the perception of value. The repeated use of “limited time”, “exclusive”, and “up to 70.0% off” cues exploits bounded rationality, where consumers make decisions under imperfect information and emotional pressure.
Moreover, the proliferation of “Black November”, a month-long discount festival has diluted the original scarcity value of Black Friday. In economic terms, when a promotional event is stretched over time, the marginal utility of urgency declines. Consumers become less responsive to promotional stimuli because the time constraint, which once created a spike in demand, no longer exists. The result is predictable: promotions feel less special, and the actual discounts become harder to identify amidst constant noise.
In sum, Black Friday in Kenya, much like elsewhere is increasingly failing to deliver on its promise. The combination of price inflation before sales, strategic price anchoring, diluted urgency, and rising retail costs has transformed what should be a competitive market event into a largely rhetorical one. For Kenyan consumers seeking real value, the most rational strategy is not to chase the hype, but to evaluate prices across longer time horizons, where true market efficiency can be observed. (Start your investment journey today with the Cytonn MMF, call +2540709101200 or email sales@cytonn.com.)
