Black Friday has a familiar picture: customers gathering outside a store before sunrise, coffee in hand, watching the doors. It is one of the year’s biggest shopping days, and, for many businesses, one of its most visible waiting days.
For a few hours, the line is the storefront experience. Everyone in it has chosen to spend time and attention with your business. That makes the queue more than an operational problem. It is concentrated demand, standing in one place, and forming an opinion about your brand before the purchase.
Black Friday’s crowd is real. So is the opportunity.
In a December 2025 survey release, the National Retail Federation (NRF) and Prosper Insights & Analytics reported that 80.3 million consumers shopped in physical stores on Black Friday 2025. The estimate came from a survey of 3,099 adults conducted November 26–30, 2025. The same release reported 202.9 million shoppers across the five-day Thanksgiving-to-Cyber-Monday period. These are last season’s reported results, not a forecast for 2026. (NRF, 2025)
The figures show the scale of the holiday shopping moment. But they don’t tell a retailer how long its own line will be, or whether that line will feel orderly, fair, and worth the wait. Those are local experiences, shaped by how a business communicates and manages the queue.
And the surge is rarely confined to one day. Thanksgiving week brings activity across multiple days, so the cafés, restaurants, salons, and service businesses near retail corridors may feel the ripple as shoppers move between stores.
Black Friday waits carry extra urgency
A line on an ordinary day can test patience. A Black Friday line can add another layer: customers may be watching for updates about a limited deal, wondering whether an item will sell out, or trying to work out how long they can wait before moving on. The purchase itself may feel time-sensitive; uncertainty about the process can make the wait harder.
In his 1985 essay, “The Psychology of Waiting Lines,” service-management writer David Maister describes how the experience of waiting can shape a customer’s view of the service overall. Among his principles: occupied time tends to feel shorter than unoccupied time, uncertainty can make a wait feel longer, and unexplained waits are harder to bear. (Maister, 1985)
Applied to Black Friday, the lesson is straightforward: a few small frictions can stack up quickly. Customers who cannot tell where the line starts, how it moves, whether a deal is still available, or what happens next may spend their time worrying instead of anticipating the visit.
Make the wait clear, fair, and worth experiencing
Businesses do not need to make every queue entertaining or elaborate. They do need to treat the wait as part of the customer experience, not a gap between marketing and service.
Acknowledge the wait honestly. If entry is delayed, say so. If an estimate is available, post it and update it when conditions change. Avoid confident promises that staff cannot support.
Explain the process. Make the line’s start and direction obvious. Tell customers what they are waiting for, how entry works, and what happens if stock or timing changes.
Make fairness visible. Clear rules help customers understand how the queue works. Where appropriate, use staff guidance, signs, barriers, or numbered tickets to reduce confusion and disputes.
Offer something worthwhile to do. At a store, this could be a clear deal map, product information, or useful updates while customers wait. A nearby café might offer a calm place to pause between shopping stops. A salon or service business may see more walk-ins and benefit from clearly communicating its own wait and booking process.
The point is not to distract customers from a problem. It is to respect their time with useful information or a pleasant experience while they wait.
Where an engagement layer can help
For businesses with waiting customers, CXperks provides an engagement layer for physical locations. Using a QR code, customers can open digital magazines, games, and trivia on their own phones, with no app, download, login, or personal data required. The experience can also surface a business’s own next steps, such as deal maps, in-store offers, hours, restock information, or loyalty sign-ups.
That can be relevant not only to retailers, but to cafés serving shopping crowds, salons and spas handling holiday appointments, and other local businesses where customers spend time on-site. CXperks follows an ENTERTAIN → ENGAGE → INSIGHT model: offer content first, make useful actions easy to find, and review anonymous engagement signals afterward. Learn more about the CXperks engagement framework.
Those signals (such as scans, dwell time, and content use) can help a team understand what earns attention. They are not proof of revenue lift, and engagement is not guaranteed. A digital experience cannot shorten the physical queue, change a wait estimate, or restock a sold-out item. It can give customers something useful to do while the business handles those operational realities.
A practical Black Friday queue checklist
- Plan the line: Review staffing, queue layout, entrances, and crowd flow before opening. Decide who will answer questions and share updates.
- Communicate honestly: Post wait expectations and explain how customers will hear about changes to timing, entry, or stock.
- Give the wait a useful purpose: Offer clear information, entertainment, or a comfortable nearby place to pause, where it fits the business.
- Capture what happened: Review scans, dwell time, engagement, customer questions, and points of confusion. Use those observations to improve next year’s plan.
- Plan beyond Friday: The holiday surge can build across the week. Coordinate communications and staffing for the broader period, not just opening morning.
The queue is part of the brand
Black Friday puts a business’s waiting experience in unusually sharp focus. Customers are already there, ready to shop, but the line is shaping how they feel about the visit before the transaction begins. A chaotic or opaque queue can leave frustration as the lasting impression. A clear, fair, well-managed one can make the business feel prepared and considerate.
The goal is not simply to move people through faster. It is to make the time they spend with you feel respected. For ideas on making on-site waiting more engaging, visit CXperks. To discuss what might fit your locations, book a conversation.
A note on Google reviews
If your Black Friday experience includes an invitation to leave a Google review, keep it neutral and optional. Google’s current policy and guidance (accessed November 2026) require reviews to reflect genuine experiences and prohibit incentives and selectively soliciting positive reviews. (Google Maps User-Generated Content Policy; Google Business Profile guidance on getting more reviews)
- No incentives, discounts, gifts, or anything of value in exchange for a review.
- No review gating, sentiment screening, or routing unhappy customers away from Google.
- No guaranteed positive reviews, requested wording, or requested star rating.
- No pressure to review on premises and no staff-written reviews.
- Any review invitation must be unfiltered and available to every customer.
CXperks can surface a review link; it does not write reviews or guarantee engagement. Reviewers must still be signed into a Google Account, as Google’s guidance explains.