Blame? I would think lowering the slope of the sales curve by a slight extension would be helpful.
This
I work for the online business unit of a very large retailer. Our (online) peaks were certainly not as high this year compared to last, but our online revenue is up over last year. I'm looking at the real-time graphs right now and we are generating more revenue this year vs. last, for today, the week and the month. I have no idea how much if any of this is being taken from the brick and mortar sales, but my area is up.
And as far as lowering the slopes, amen brother. We test our site for peak loads and it's much easier to sustain a moderate load for a long period than it would be to handle all our sales volume in a single day. Cheaper too, probably to the tune of several million in hardware alone. In our case, we can do both as we tested to around 400% of what we actually saw on Black Friday (thanks to offloading a significant portion to Thanksgiving evening).