When Black Friday comes…
November 13, 2009Jon Brooks 2 Comments »Black Friday, as inveterate shoppers well know, is the name for the Friday after Thanksgiving, which marks the beginning of the traditional Christmas shopping season. This year, the day falls on November 27th. From Wikipedia:
Black Friday is not an official holiday, but many employees have the day off (with the exceptions of those employed in Retailing and Banking), which increases the number of potential shoppers…Many retailers open extremely early, with most typically opening at 5AM or earlier. Some of the larger retailers such as Sears, Macys and Walmart have been reported to open as early as midnight…and remain open for 24 hours. Upon opening, retailers offer doorbuster deals and loss leaders to draw people to their stores.
In recent years, 
several Google pages-worth of web sites devoted to tracking retailers’ Black Friday sales ads have proliferated. Today, GottaDeal.com is causing Pavlovian palpitations among the sales-seeking set with its posting of what it says will be sales prices for over 150 items.
According to CNN:
Brad Olson, founder of Gottadeal.com, a Web site that markets itself as one of many “official” Black Friday deal sites, said Wednesday that he received a copy of the discount retailer’s ad…
Olson, who’s been tracking annual Black Friday deals from Wal-Mart (WMT, Fortune 500), Target (TGT, Fortune 500), Sears (S, Fortune 500) and other chain stores for the past six years, said Target’s deals look “pretty aggressive” this year.
That’s not particularly surprising given that the past 10 months have been a sales nightmare for most merchants.
Okay, so what do we got here? Well, according to Gottadeal.com, come BlackFriday, you’ll see these items among the discounted items at Target:
- $8 mens jeans and dress pants
- $10 computer flash drives, $20 DVD players
- $3 coffeemakers
- $3 toasters
- $25 vacuums
- $34 luggage sets
- $24 microwave ovens
- $20 iTunes giftcards w/ $25 value
- $4 DVDs
- $6.50 CDs
- $246 wide screen TVs
- $7 video games
Plus the one thing that might tempt me out of bed at four a.m. to go stand on line in late-November weather: a $15 Hello Kitty tea cup-shaped clock radio.
So there you have it. Some other Black Friday ad sites:
But before you put on your track shoes, knee pads, and football helmet, in anticipation of wading into what surely will be the frenzied clustermuck of recession-addled shoppers, keep in mind last year’s Black Friday stampede in Long Island, New York, which resulted in the death of a Wal-Mart employee.
Frankly, they’d have to be selling $10 bills for $5 to get me out there.
If you’re that hellbent on getting a good deal, maybe better to sit out Black Friday and wait for Cyber Monday, when the person with the biggest bandwidth, not the sharpest elbows, gets to take home the prized goods.
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