PHOTOGRAPH BY PATRICK T. FALLON / BLOOMBERG VIA GETTY

Last week, ahead of the holiday season, Walmart announced that it was transforming the final Friday of November, the day of pre-Christmas sales known as Black Friday, into a five-day period its calling “the New Black Friday.” The New Black Friday will begin on the evening of Thanksgiving and last through the following Monday. Those who want to maximize their access to the store’s holiday deals—starting Thursday at 6 P.M., with a hundred-and-ninety-nine-dollar iPad Mini and other specials—may need to consider moving Thanksgiving dinner to breakfast time. “It used to be called Black Friday, then it became Thursday, now it’s a week long,” Walmart’s U.S. chief merchant, Duncan Mac Naughton, said. “Maybe we should just call it November.” At this rate, Black Friday will replace the Gregorian calendar in around 2025.

Walmart, as the world’s biggest retailer by sales, is generally seen as extremely powerful. And it is, of course, but its clout is diminishing—partly because of competition from online retailers like Amazon; partly because many of the low-income people who shop at Walmart haven’t seen their fortunes improve much, if at all, since the recession ended; and partly because other retailers have also been lowering their prices and attracting more people. On Thursday, Walmart warned investors that its earnings for the year are now expected to be lower than it had projected. That announcement came after a prior forecast adjustment in August. Greg Foran, the president and C.E.O. of Walmart U.S., seemed, on a call with investors, to be trying to temper expectations about how successful Walmart would be with its holiday sales: “We expect this holiday season to be highly competitive,” he said.

This competitiveness has come to involve a crude sort of one-upmanship. If one retailer starts Black Friday at 6 P.M. on Thursday, another will soon move the start time to 5 P.M.—which is, in fact, what Best Buy is doing this year. A pair of friends have been waiting outside a Best Buy in Beaumont, California, since November 5th, swaddled in blankets and surrounded by bags of snacks, hoping to get one of the fifty-inch, high-definition TVs that will go on sale for about two hundred dollars on Thanksgiving night. “Blankets, uh, thermals—we’re good to go,” one of them told a TV reporter, sounding somewhat dazed, her face partly covered by her hoodie and a bit of food pasted to her mouth. Her husband, who has mostly been sleeping at home, more articulately explained, “The point is to get the sales, because everybody’s on a fixed income.”

Late last week, I called up Paul Ivanovsky, who lives near Houston and makes a living keeping track of Walmart’s deals. Ivanovsky runs I Heart the Mart, which, he believes, is the only independent Web site dedicated to notifying and advising people about Walmart promotions. (He sometimes writes about other retailers, too.) Walmart doesn’t pay him for his posts, though, like other bloggers, he earns affiliate fees from Walmart and other retailers when his site sends shoppers to theirs. He likes Walmart because it’s easy to get deals there, he said, but he’s not a Walmart apologist, and, when I asked him about the New Black Friday, he said, “In all honestly, it’s kind of nonsense.” People who pay close attention to Walmart’s sales know that they can often get better deals at other times, he said.

As Amy Merrick explained in November of 2013, “Rather than selling most merchandise at full price and marking down what doesn’t sell, stores now engineer their prices, so that the ‘discounted’ prices are actually at the level they had wanted all along.” And it’s true that these levels aren’t necessarily the lowest of the year: Merrick referenced research published in the Wall Street Journal and Consumer Reports that found that Elmo dolls, Ugg boots, Samsung TVs, and KitchenAid stand mixers were sold at lower prices at other times of the year, and that many home appliances and consumer gadgets are marked down to their lowest price in December.

In past years, Ivanovsky and his wife, who also makes her living by publishing a shopping blog, have spread their holiday purchases throughout the year. The couple is savvier than most people about the limitations of Black Friday, but others seem to be realizing that the sales might not be worth their time, too. Online shopping has made it easier for people to be aware of deals even if they aren’t paying close attention. If you’re in the market for a Samsung TV, you’re probably going to look on the Web for the best sale rather than waiting until the day after Thanksgiving to wander through the mall, hoping to stumble on a good deal. In fact, Walmart’s decision to spread Black Friday over five days is, perhaps counterintuitively, a response to the declining relevance of Black Friday. Mac Naughton, the Walmart executive, has said that, over the past couple of years, fewer people have been camping out at Walmart stores in the middle of night to take advantage of holiday sales. Instead, they’re shopping online or visiting stores on their own schedule.

Still, in Ivanovsky’s line of work, he acknowledged, Black Friday remains “the Super Bowl.” When the sales start, he visits several Walmarts and chats with shoppers about what they’re up to, so that he can keep his readers informed. (He’s a minor celebrity in Walmart circles: “The people who do follow the site or see me on the news—they freak out when they see me,” he said.) He and his wife have seven kids and, given their line of work, there have been years that the holiday gift-giving has gotten a bit out of control: “You end up with like a hundred and fifty presents.” He added, “This year, we’re actually doing something a little bit different. All the kids will get their present from Santa, and then we’re kind of doing a family vacation instead of Christmas presents.”