Why can’t every day be Black Friday?

I’ll spare you the hot take on Black Friday sales ruining our enjoyment and observance of Thanksgiving. There are dozens of other columns, Facebook memes and indignant commentators for that.

But Black Friday — the busiest shopping day of the year, so named because most brands aren’t “in the black” until sales on the day after Thanksgiving make them profitable for the year — feels less relevant every year. For the past few years, Black Friday has seeped into sales on Thanksgiving Day, first at midnight, then during the day, and now early in the morning on the holiday itself. Cyber Monday has been its own holiday for even longer than “Black Friday Eve,” or whatever we call Thanksgiving with shopping.

Black Friday pretty much jumped the shark in 2008, when a Walmart employee in Long Island was trampled to death by the horde of shoppers that burst through the door. Anecdotally, fewer and fewer people I know line up at Best Buy or Target for the big event.

So why shouldn’t brands rethink Black Friday as an organizing principle for their annual revenues and their marketing calendars? Why wait until nearly the last month of the year to be in the black? I concede that it’s not a possibility for some of the big-box stores too entwined in this model, but for smaller or emerging franchises contemplating whether they should sell out on Black Friday or stay open all day on Thanksgiving, perhaps it might be better to play the long game.

Speaking purely as a consumer, and not as an MBA with a focus in marketing analytics, I can say that a Black Friday sale does not engender any loyalty from me to any brand. In fact, usually the opposite occurs. I only visit some stores during the holiday shopping season to take advantage of the aggressive discounts — and “take advantage” is the most appropriate phrase for it.

Sure, sometimes that’s a function of what I’m looking to buy, because I’m not always in the market for a big-screen TV, but often I’ll avoid stores for 11 months out of the year because they’re not differentiated from any other competitor selling the same electronics, clothes or furniture. I just know that I could get whatever I’m looking for in December without the giant markup. Why should I pay retail?

But conversely, a brand that cultivates me as a loyalty program member and offers a smaller discount for the whole year stands a much better chance of keeping my business, not just for Black Friday and the holidays, but every day. The best example would be Target, which has hooked my wife and me with the Red Card, which offers 5 percent off all our purchases. With that card, Target leapfrogged our local grocery store chain as where we shop every weekend for the week ahead.

And of course, since the chain has me in its clutches all year, it usually gets most of my holiday shopping business, in the brick-and-mortar store and online.