While electronics, clothing, and cosmetics retailers offer discounts for Black Friday, supermarket chains, with few exceptions, are not offering special discounts on groceries. Instead, you will find deals on items like toiletries, clothing, and toys.
The lack of food discounts during Black Friday is surprising. “If chains do have discounts on Black Friday, they are mostly consumer goods,” confirmed Monika Kopčilová, a product specialist from the comparator Kupi.cz. An analysis showed that only the Lidl chain offers Black Friday discounts on groceries, including items like butter, toast, bread, sweets, or wine, at a rate of 30 or 40 percent.
However, these discounts are conditional on activating a coupon in the loyalty application and purchasing over 300 crowns, with each coupon valid for one day only—for instance, after the discount, butter costs 27.90 crowns.
“The rotation of discounts and promo actions for groceries differs from non-grocery goods and electronics. While non-food items have their Black Friday, Albert offers a flyer with hundreds of items at promotional prices every week,” said Jiří Mareček, a spokesperson for Albert.
Other chains also offer discounts on selected groceries in classic weekly flyers but have not decided to include groceries in the special Black Friday promotions. This may be related to retail sales in recent months, which have been falling more significantly for necessary goods, such as electronics or clothing, and retailers are trying to break this trend before Christmas.
It’s worth noting that food items, in the last two years, were among those items in the consumer basket that have become the most expensive. With the persistent economic uncertainty, supermarkets may miss out on a significant opportunity to boost sales by excluding groceries from their Black Friday deals.