Where will you be spending Thanksgiving night? Warm in your bed, in a Tryptophan-induced coma, or camped out in a sleeping bag by a superstore in a line defined by crime scene tape with hundreds of your rivals for limited quantities of this year's model of Tickle-Me Elmo?
What I'm really asking is: are you a Black Friday believer?
Personally, I'm not. I can appreciate clever marketing gimmicks and catchy catch phrases, and greatly admire whoever dreamed up the concept of prodding suckers out before dawn to spend more than they imagined under the guise of saving a bundle. After all, if Black Friday is the busiest shopping day of the year, extending its hours can only be considered making a good thing better, at least to those who swipe the credit cards.
But as much as I enjoy knowing the buzzwords, I consider myself immune to all that retail posturing. Why risk a trampling for a bargain you can't even get if you haven't already staked out your spot? Unless you're a "people person"--and these days you'd have to be crazy to call yourself that--you're better off at home. This year, Amazon.com is offering hourly deals along with thousands of products on sale for a limited time. Count me in.
Google searches for the term "Black Friday" are up exponentially. This hellish kickoff to Christmas shopping is generating interest earlier and more widely than in the past two holiday seasons. Searches on the term "black Friday ads" are up exponentially every year since 2005.
The brick-and-mortar stores want you to catch the fever, and they try to do it by controlling information. They withhold their specials until the morning edition of that old-fashioned hunk of dead trees known as a newspaper hits your front porch on the fourth Thursday morning of November. They want you to plan your spending while you're in a raw-turkey-induced hysteria of getting ready for a dozen relatives you don't really like, or a drunken stupor after the carcass has been stripped bare. Websites that have sprung up to offer sneak peeks at their deals have received cease-and-desist letters and have been forced to remove pricing information, known in legalese as "trade secrets."
If they don't want to tell you what you'll find when you get there until you're too whacked out to know whether you really want it, I say humbug. Let them pay their bleary-eyed workers overtime. Let them listen to threatened lawsuits from the plodders who became doorstops on the way in. Let them field complaints from the majority who didn't show up in time to get the vouchers for the reduced-price HDTV that will be discontinued in December anyway. I'll be home asleep, at least until my son returns from Best Buy and Gamestop with tales of marauding hordes and an armful of stuff his father let him buy.
Originally published November 18, 2007
Showing posts with label shopping. Show all posts
Showing posts with label shopping. Show all posts
Black Friday Sales
It's never too early to start planning for Black Friday mayhem. Believe it or not the Black Friday ads are starting to trickle out; more will be posted as they are available.
Southeastern U.S. discounter Fred's has a 45-item Fred's Super Dollar Black Friday ad along with a 4-page Fred's ad. Their Black Friday sale starts at
5am and is one-day only. The four released pages represent pages 17-20
of the Fred's advertisement.
Let's hope when we see the word "doorbusters" it doesn't actually mean Black Friday crowds will actually be breaking down the doors to get inside. But it wouldn't be the first time Black Friday caused in-store breakage.
Harbor Freight has a 35-item Black Friday ad and a 4-page ad.
Worth noting: Harbor Freight is letting their Inside Track Club members ($30/yr for membership) enter the store a full hour before regular customers (6am vs. 7am). Hope this does not become a trend among other stores!
Worth noting: Harbor Freight is letting their Inside Track Club members ($30/yr for membership) enter the store a full hour before regular customers (6am vs. 7am). Hope this does not become a trend among other stores!
The Twisted Psychology of Black Friday (Videos)
Black Friday Best Buy Style
Geek Squad Agent White neglects his post to offer rude commentary on Black Friday . It is 5:30am and there is a mob of people rushing in--and yet somehow not rushing fast enough to satisfy him.
Black Friday: Target
How badly do you want that DVD player? How about waiting all night outside in the cold? Seven hours in a sleeping bag on the pavement outside a shopping center is...well, crazy!
Black Friday At Wal-Mart
Here's what it's like walking through Wal-Mart about 10 minutes after the doors opened for Black Friday 2006. Note the amount of stuff in those shopping carts!
Black Friday at Circuit City: Run!
And the race is on! Black Friday 2006 was an indoor marathon.
Wouldn't You Like to Be a Pepper Too? (Videos)
Black Friday 2011: Apparently inspired by UC Davis security techniques, a woman used pepper spray to get an Xbox 360 at half price. The most shocking part: she checked out and disappeared despite being "captured" on countless cell phone videos and leaving a wake of 20 injured shoppers.
The Inspiration?
The Most Frenzied Time of the Year
Holiday shopping officially kicks off on "Black Friday," the day after Thanksgiving. Retail is a mystery to me - between rent, utilities, insurance, staff, inventory, marketing and the nightmare of dealing with (shudder) the public, I just don't get how it's still viable. Factor in a growing consumer hunger for discounts and the web's ubiquitous offers of free shipping (and often no sales tax), and it's hard to see how anything ever gets sold in a physical store, especially at full price.
Surely I can't be the only one who feels this way. And for those of us who don't want to go out to shop, enter Amazon.com's Holiday Countdown Store
. The site is offering special deals through Christmas Eve.
Why set the alarm for 2:00a.m., then bundle up and fight the hordes? Bring a little tranquility and rationality to your holiday shopping and just click.
Surely I can't be the only one who feels this way. And for those of us who don't want to go out to shop, enter Amazon.com's Holiday Countdown Store
. The site is offering special deals through Christmas Eve. Why set the alarm for 2:00a.m., then bundle up and fight the hordes? Bring a little tranquility and rationality to your holiday shopping and just click
.
Hellish Christmas Shopping (Videos)
Christmas Shopping at the Liquor Store
This one speaks for itself.
Ideas to Reduce Stress During the Holidays
As the holiday shopping season gets underway, having too little time may cause shoppers to get stressed out. Consumer forecasters project this will lead many to focus on the "one-stop-shopping" strategy.In other words, buy all your gifts at the supermarket!
A Shopping Tale of Three Brothers
Three brothers go Christmas shopping for their parents.
Pseudo Black Friday
It's beginning to feel a lot like...Black Friday! Yes, the buzz is starting even though Thanksgiving isn't until November 25th and Black Friday not until the wee hours of the following morning.
Some retailers just can't wait, though. They're using the name Black Friday in vain, to entice recession-weary consumers back under the fluorescents.Check out this Sears weekly circular masquerading as an early Black Friday promotion.
Some retailers just can't wait, though. They're using the name Black Friday in vain, to entice recession-weary consumers back under the fluorescents.Check out this Sears weekly circular masquerading as an early Black Friday promotion.
Black Friday Sagas
Do you have any hellish Black Friday stories? If so, we'd love to hear them. This year, though, we recommend staying home and using Amazon.com. Carey Hart of BLASTmedia in Indianapolis tells a hellish – yet typical – Black Friday tale.
A couple years ago, I made the mistake of being a Black Friday shopper, and dragging my boyfriend along with me. Poor guy, it was our first major holiday together and I nearly ruined it!
We live in Indianapolis, and there is a big outlet mall about 40 minutes south of the city. I normally NEVER go shopping on Black Friday, and have no idea what was going through my head that year. Regardless, I had heard that the outlet stores were having amazing sales that day, and they opened at the ungodly hour of 3 am. So we made the trip down the interstate.
We ended up getting stuck in the absolute worst traffic of all-time, in the middle of a winter night. We were stuck on the interstate, with no opportunity to turn around and no exits for at least 3 hours. It was absolutely awful.
When we finally made it to the mall, the parking lot was equally insane and we had to walk really far. I didn't want all our suffering to be for nothing, so I still shopped – and waited in even more lines! The line for the Coach store was out the door and down the sidewalk, but I persisted. The bargains were OK, but not that great. What was I thinking? I still have no idea, and three years later, the thought still makes my boyfriend and me both cringe. It was, by far, the worst shopping trip of our lives!
A couple years ago, I made the mistake of being a Black Friday shopper, and dragging my boyfriend along with me. Poor guy, it was our first major holiday together and I nearly ruined it!
We live in Indianapolis, and there is a big outlet mall about 40 minutes south of the city. I normally NEVER go shopping on Black Friday, and have no idea what was going through my head that year. Regardless, I had heard that the outlet stores were having amazing sales that day, and they opened at the ungodly hour of 3 am. So we made the trip down the interstate.
We ended up getting stuck in the absolute worst traffic of all-time, in the middle of a winter night. We were stuck on the interstate, with no opportunity to turn around and no exits for at least 3 hours. It was absolutely awful.
When we finally made it to the mall, the parking lot was equally insane and we had to walk really far. I didn't want all our suffering to be for nothing, so I still shopped – and waited in even more lines! The line for the Coach store was out the door and down the sidewalk, but I persisted. The bargains were OK, but not that great. What was I thinking? I still have no idea, and three years later, the thought still makes my boyfriend and me both cringe. It was, by far, the worst shopping trip of our lives!
Christmas - and Chanukkah - in New York
I'm a New Yorker. Sure, I live in Los Angeles; in February it will be 20 years since I made the move. But while I may be in LA, I'm not of LA. I yearn for New York and have a physical need to check in regularly.
And I've kept up. I read the New York Times, New Yorker and New York Magazine every single week. I resent that NY1 isn't available on DirecTV. I met with someone in the development office of NYU, my alma mater, just two weeks ago.
My New York friends are the ones I came of age with, and they know me in ways my LA friends don't (and that's a good thing--not everyone should remember the way you looked in braces or the way you smelled first time you got drunk). Perhaps most importantly, my brother and sister and their families are both there. (My mom now lives in Puerto Rico, but that's a topic for another blogging day. Caution: hellish Thanksgiving story ahead.)
In short, if I could have figured out a way to have a dog, a car, a tree and a second bedroom in NYC, I might still be there. But I couldn't so I'm not. Instead, I head east on a seasonal basis: spring and fall because they're so perfect there, summer because there's no school schedule to work around. And in December, I need my Christmas-in-New York fix.
I haven't had that fix in a while and it's time. I want to shop. More specifically, I want to window shop at the big department stores like Lord & Taylor and Bergdorf Goodman. OK, I admit I'll go inside, too. I want to see friends and family. I want to deliver Christmas cookies and gifts personally.
So I booked a trip the only days I could get away this month. And I blew it. The first night I'm gone is the first night of Chanukkah.
Yes, despite my Christmas planning, I'm also a Cohen, and we celebrate both holidays around our house. My favorite part of gift-buying is crafting the eight nights of gifts for my son. I start strong on Night One, then psych him out with a book or socks on Night Two. I drop hints about one thing then give another on Night Three. And so on. I like the lighting of the candles and the (for me, phonetic) recitation of the prayer. But this year I'll be away from my family for the first two nights. Oy, the guillt.
I'm off right now to buy something really exceptional for Night One. I might even have to pick up something better than usual for my husband. He doesn't track the holidays and hasn't yet figured out that my trip coincides with Chanukkah, so I still have time to figure out how to make up for my absence.
Over-spending: the next best thing to being there.
And I've kept up. I read the New York Times, New Yorker and New York Magazine every single week. I resent that NY1 isn't available on DirecTV. I met with someone in the development office of NYU, my alma mater, just two weeks ago.
My New York friends are the ones I came of age with, and they know me in ways my LA friends don't (and that's a good thing--not everyone should remember the way you looked in braces or the way you smelled first time you got drunk). Perhaps most importantly, my brother and sister and their families are both there. (My mom now lives in Puerto Rico, but that's a topic for another blogging day. Caution: hellish Thanksgiving story ahead.)
In short, if I could have figured out a way to have a dog, a car, a tree and a second bedroom in NYC, I might still be there. But I couldn't so I'm not. Instead, I head east on a seasonal basis: spring and fall because they're so perfect there, summer because there's no school schedule to work around. And in December, I need my Christmas-in-New York fix.
I haven't had that fix in a while and it's time. I want to shop. More specifically, I want to window shop at the big department stores like Lord & Taylor and Bergdorf Goodman. OK, I admit I'll go inside, too. I want to see friends and family. I want to deliver Christmas cookies and gifts personally.
So I booked a trip the only days I could get away this month. And I blew it. The first night I'm gone is the first night of Chanukkah.
Yes, despite my Christmas planning, I'm also a Cohen, and we celebrate both holidays around our house. My favorite part of gift-buying is crafting the eight nights of gifts for my son. I start strong on Night One, then psych him out with a book or socks on Night Two. I drop hints about one thing then give another on Night Three. And so on. I like the lighting of the candles and the (for me, phonetic) recitation of the prayer. But this year I'll be away from my family for the first two nights. Oy, the guillt.
I'm off right now to buy something really exceptional for Night One. I might even have to pick up something better than usual for my husband. He doesn't track the holidays and hasn't yet figured out that my trip coincides with Chanukkah, so I still have time to figure out how to make up for my absence.
Over-spending: the next best thing to being there.
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