Walmart extends holiday deals event in October, upping competition with Amazon and Target

“We’re offering [customers] earlier and longer opportunities to win the holidays, and we’re doing it through our assortment, prices and experience,” Watkins said. “This helps ensure that customers can plan out their spending, avoid last-minute stress and take advantage of the best deals early and often.”

Watkins said the retailer’s same-day delivery options will be available to an additional 12 million households with a recently expanded delivery scope, and that four of its five “next-generation” fulfillment centers — equipped with new technology and more capacity for storage and fulfillment — are fully operational, compared to one last year. More than 40% of Walmart’s fulfillment center volume will flow through these facilities, Watkins said.

The earlier holiday event comes as the traditional promotional cycles around holidays and seasons have shifted in response to changing consumer behavior and supply chain bottlenecks early on in the pandemic. Halloween collections hit shelves as early as June this year. Dunkin’s fall drinks launched in August. And despite inflationary pressures, Walmart shared in its second-quarter earnings that its revenue increased by almost 5% year-over-year and projected an optimistic but cautious view of consumer demand.

“I think the trend that we saw in the summer related to buying and searching for Halloween early tells us, one, they’re shopping; two, they want value on items they want to celebrate; and, they’re finding the things that they want to celebrate at Walmart,” Watkins said.

Amazon’s Prime Day sales events, now both in July and October, have also driven demand throughout the year and pulled forward back-to-school and holiday sales. Amazon’s fall Prime Day-like sale dubbed “Prime Big Deal Days,” which debuted in 2022, will return Oct. 8 and 9. Target announced its Target Circle Week will run Oct. 6 through Oct. 12 and that it will introduce 50% more affordable holiday items for $5 and $10 this year than last year.

This year, 32% of consumers plan to begin holiday shopping before November — a slightly larger share than in 2022 and 2023 — according to a new survey from Gartner, which attributes this to earlier retail promotions. Watkins pointed to another study from Bankrate that shows nearly half of holiday shoppers plan to start their holiday shopping as early as August and September.

Still, Gartner found 65% of brands didn’t post holiday messages on Instagram until November or December, and posts before November garnered higher engagement than those later on. “Our guidance to CMOs is absolutely to begin marketing earlier than November to capture a holiday-focused consumer,” said Kassi Socha, director analyst for Gartner. “I think that’s where big-box, the Walmarts, Targets, Amazons of the world do really well, in starting and moving up that holiday messaging early.”

Some shoppers may choose to holiday shop earlier to help manage their budgets. They may have more to spend in July or August than in the winter when they have costs like travel or heating their home.

“By breaking it up, they can not only pay in installments and start paying in July and finish paying in December and/or they may be able to make that dollar go a little bit farther by shopping the earlier sales,” Socha said, adding that people who need to cut back will do so from their own discretionary spending rather than from what they are spending on gifts for others.