If you're planning your Black Friday strategy, we measured what actually happened in stores across six European markets in 2025.

If you're a retailer planning your Black Friday strategy, we ran a study to find out what actually works. We measured footfall in real stores on Black Friday 2025 across France, Spain, Germany, the UK, Italy and Belgium, split by shopping centres, high streets and standalone stores, then compared the whole weekend with the year before.

Here's what came out of it. The Friday itself is still a genuine traffic event, and footfall rose in every single country and format we looked at. The weekend around it is where things come apart. Only one of the six countries finished ahead of its 2024 weekend, and some fell a long way behind. So Black Friday isn't getting bigger, it's shrinking.

That has a few consequences for how you plan 2026. You should staff for the day, because the extra traffic won't stick around through the weekend. Put your stock, your people and your in-store activation into shopping centres first, since that's where the spike concentrated in every country we studied.

Then be careful about borrowing a playbook from another country next door. The size of the spike varied by a factor of more than two between the strongest and weakest country.

Do you want a personnalised plan for your store? Ask Gini by MyTraffic.