$6.8 billion. That's what Australians spent over the Black Friday weekend, according to the Australian Retailers Association and Roy Morgan. A 4% increase on last year. Record headlines. Champagne corks popping in retail boardrooms across the country.

But underneath the celebration, three quieter stories from Black Friday 2025 paint a very different picture of what's actually happening in Australian retail. Stories about regulatory crackdowns, commercial desperation, and customers who walked away feeling worse than when they started.

The $6.8 billion headline looks impressive. What it doesn't tell you is whether any of that money was actually profitable, or whether brands just trained another generation of customers to never pay full price again.

When the Regulator Feels the Need to Issue a Warning

On 10 November, two and a half weeks before Black Friday, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission did something unusual. They announced a pre-emptive enforcement sweep targeting Black Friday sales practices. Not a post-event investigation. A warning shot.

"We are putting retailers on notice to review their sales advertising practices," said ACCC Deputy Chair Catriona Lowe. The watchdog published a hit list of tactics they'd be watching for: fake countdown timers, "sitewide" sale claims that quietly exclude half the catalogue, "up to 50% off" promotions where almost nothing actually hits that discount, and the classic was/now pricing games where the "was" price never really existed.

This wasn't the ACCC's first rodeo. Their sweep of Black Friday 2024 had already resulted in penalties. In June 2025, three retailers paid $19,800 each for allegedly misleading customers about the scope of their discounts. Michael Hill, MyHouse, and Hairhouse had all promoted "sitewide" sales that weren't actually sitewide. The ACCC has ongoing investigations into other retailers from the same period.

Think about what this means. The consumer protection regulator now considers Black Friday promotional practices problematic enough to warrant dedicated enforcement resources and public warnings. This isn't about a few bad actors cutting corners. It's about systemic pressure pushing retailers toward increasingly questionable tactics.

When you need to mislead customers about your discounts to compete, something has broken in your pricing strategy. And when enough retailers feel that pressure simultaneously, it stops being a strategy problem and becomes a market problem.

The Margin Destruction Nobody Talks About

Sarah James runs The Sensory Specialist, an Australian brand creating products for neurodivergent children. She's been watching Black Friday with growing alarm.

"Some retailers are discounting branded products 30-50 per cent below the price we are contractually allowed to sell at," she wrote in Business Builders last week. "You cannot buy stock at those prices. In a desperate bid to generate cash flow or hit KPIs, the only way to offer these deals is by breaking supplier agreements or taking a deliberate financial loss."

Read that again. Retailers selling products below what it costs to buy them wholesale. Not as a loss leader strategy on a few items. As a survival mechanism across their catalogues.

James captures the long-term damage in a single sentence: "Once you discount below cost, the damage to your margins, your brand value and long-term customer expectations is immense."

The numbers back her up. According to Xero's research, only 39% of Australian small businesses committed to discounting for Black Friday 2025. That's down 22 percentage points from 2024. Nearly a third said they simply can't afford to offer discounts. And 64% reported feeling pressure to compete with big brands, up 4% from last year.

Small businesses are caught in an impossible position. Participate in the discount frenzy and destroy your margins. Sit it out and watch customers flow to competitors. Either way, you lose.

Dr Angel Zhong, Professor of Finance at RMIT, summarised the broader problem: "Many businesses are finding that the volume gains from Black Friday no longer offset the margin losses. This is particularly true when factoring in increased logistics costs and the resources required to support peak shopping periods."

KPMG's Australian Retail Outlook 2025 put it more bluntly: "Traditional discounting strategies are losing their effectiveness."

The maths has stopped working. But the fear of missing out keeps retailers discounting anyway.

53% of Customers Regret Participating

Here's the number that should stop every marketer in their tracks.

According to CHOICE's October 2025 survey, 53% of Australians who've bought something in a Black Friday sale regretted the purchase or had a negative experience. More than half.

The issues they cited included spending more money than intended, falling victim to misleading discounts, receiving poor quality products, and problems with deliveries and returns.

"Retailers are doing every trick in the book to get people to make a purchase," said CHOICE journalist Liam Kennedy, "and our research shows people are often left feeling pressured or disappointed."

This creates a strange dynamic. Retailers are destroying their margins to offer discounts. Customers are taking those discounts. And more than half of those customers end up unhappy anyway.

Who's winning here?

The Deloitte Retail Holiday Report adds another layer. While 33% of consumers planned to spend more than last year, only 15% said they actually feel financially confident. And 34% admitted they're likely to switch brands for a better deal, rising to 42% among under-35s.

Customers aren't loyal to brands anymore. They're loyal to discounts. And brands have trained them to be that way.

Three Broken Relationships

What Black Friday 2025 reveals is three relationships that have gone wrong simultaneously.

Retailers and regulators. The ACCC doesn't announce enforcement sweeps for healthy markets. When the watchdog feels compelled to publicly warn an entire sector before a sales event, trust has already eroded. The fines from 2024 and the ongoing investigations signal that misleading practices have become common enough to warrant dedicated resources.

Retailers and their margins. When businesses routinely sell below cost, break supplier agreements, and watch volume gains fail to offset margin losses, commercial logic has been abandoned. What remains is fear. Fear of being left out. Fear of losing market share. Fear of what happens if you're the only one not discounting.

Retailers and customers. A 53% regret rate isn't a customer satisfaction problem. It's a sign that the entire value exchange has gone wrong. Customers feel pressured and disappointed. Retailers feel trapped and unprofitable. Both sides are participating in an event neither truly benefits from.

The Question Nobody's Asking

Here's what's missing from most Black Friday post-mortems: Did you actually need to discount that hard?

Not "did your competitors discount" or "did customers expect discounts" or "did you hit your revenue targets." Those questions assume discounting was necessary. The real question is whether you had evidence that your customers required a discount to buy, or whether you just assumed they did because everyone else was discounting.

Research from Google and Kantar found that strong brands can command prices up to twice those of weaker competitors. Their four-year study showed that brands which improved their pricing power added 67% to their brand value, compared to 33% for brands that didn't.

Pricing power isn't about refusing to discount. It's about knowing whether you need to. Some brands genuinely compete on price and discounting makes strategic sense. But many brands discount out of fear rather than strategy, without any real evidence that their customers required the incentive.

The difference between those two positions is the difference between informed decision-making and expensive guesswork.

Do you know your actual price elasticity? Do you know what your brand means to customers beyond price? Do you know how your consideration rates compare to your market share? Do you know which of your products could hold price and which genuinely need discounting to move?

If you don't have answers to these questions, you're making million-dollar pricing decisions based on what your competitors are doing and what you assume customers want. That's not a strategy. That's following the herd off a cliff.

What Comprehensive Brand Research Would Have Told You

The retailers who navigated Black Friday well, and they do exist, share one thing in common. They made decisions based on evidence about their own brand, not assumptions based on market noise.

Comprehensive brand research answers the questions that matter before you set your discount strategy. Not vanity metrics that look good in dashboards. Real strategic intelligence about your brand's position, your customers' perceptions, and your actual pricing power.

This isn't something you can get from cheap monthly tracking that pings the same panel of professional survey respondents with generic questions. The brands getting caught in the discount trap often have tracking data. What they lack is insight.

There's a meaningful difference between data that tells you what happened and research that tells you why it happened and what to do about it. The former fills dashboards. The latter informs strategy.

The brands that held their nerve this Black Friday, that discounted strategically rather than desperately, that emerged with margins intact and customer relationships strengthened, they didn't get lucky. They had evidence.

The Real Cost of Black Friday 2025

$6.8 billion in sales sounds like success. But factor in the ACCC fines and investigations, the margin destruction across the retail sector, and the 53% of customers who regret participating, and the picture changes.

Black Friday 2025 might be remembered as the year Australian retail started asking whether the event is still worth it. Whether the volume gains justify the margin losses. Whether the short-term revenue spike is worth the long-term brand damage. Whether training customers to expect deep discounts is a sustainable strategy or a race to the bottom.

The brands asking these questions have an advantage heading into 2026. They're looking for evidence rather than following assumptions. They're measuring pricing power rather than just sales volume. They're building brand equity rather than just burning through it.

The brands that aren't asking these questions will probably do the same thing next year. Discount hard, cross their fingers, and hope the revenue numbers look good enough that nobody asks about the margins.

The fines suggest the regulator is watching. The small business testimony suggests the margins have stopped working. The 53% regret rate suggests the customers aren't happy.

Maybe it's time to ask better questions.

Wondering whether your brand actually needed to discount this Black Friday? Our Brand Health Review helps you understand your true pricing power before next year's sales season. Book a conversation to find out what your customers actually think, not what you assume they think.