The Black Thursday/Friday Experience & Big-Picture Observations

Hope everyone had a pleasant Thanksgiving weekend..

Don't know about you, our dear readers but after the turkey and trimmings were quickly scarfed down, yours truly decided to go visit the local mall and other stores that were open Thursday night as part of the big Black Friday sales push..

From my experiences of that evening, it was absolutely nothing at all like what Drudge and other vile sensationalist skunk media covered of the event..  There were no fights, gunshots or knife play or other senseless mayhem.

Everything was actually quite civil and relatively tame.

I first started around 9p with a visit to the local Target...  The parking lot was 4/5th full.

To give comparison, a few years ago when Target opened 6a on Friday, the lot was so full, I had to park across the street then wait in a massively long line that took 5 min to reach destination of the front doors.

Last Thursday I had zero wait..  There was great ease of movement and pretty much all the doorbusters i.e. HDTVs, Blu-Ray DVD players, etc were on the first floor and there was a quite a lot of them in stock..

So much in stock that when I went back Friday evening to return a doorbuster which happened to be defective, I saw there were still 10 HDTVs and at least 2 dozen portable DVD players just sitting there waiting to be purchased at the 33-45% off sale prices.

I did purchase a few things at Target and the wait time to get to a cashier was Zero.. It was instant and immediate check out...

No line at all and in fact more registers were open at that moment than anytime I've ever seen the rest of the year..  Usually you're lucky if stores like Target have more than 3 registers open at a time regardless of the long lines of people waiting to check out..

Most of the other sales in the store were really what I call "pretend" or everyday sales, or they are not quite the bargain they seem.

For instance Target advertised a discount on iTunes where if you can buy $60 worth of cards for $50.. That comes to a 17.3% discount.    Bed, Bath & Beyond has been having a sale since mid November (not sure if its still going on) where you spend $20 for a $25 gift card (a 20% savings)

The doorbusters are usually what are called loss-leaders meaning the store is losing money for each item it sells but hopes it will make up the difference and then-some by the customer also buying regularly priced merchandise.

So next I checked out the local mall.. by this time, it was around 10p or so..  I parked at Macy's and once again there was plenty of parking spaces to be found without any difficulty.

I was interested in stopping at Macy's because they had this really good doorbuster of a 5-piece luggage set normally $200 for only $50.  It was available in two colors and there were a dozen or so of each available to purchase.. The time the wait in line to pay for the item was a mere 3 minutes...

Once I put the item in the car then popped back into the mall, I decided to take a walk around to check out activity in other stores..

The crowd at the mall was exactly what one would expect say on a Sunday afternoon and really nothing more.  Nothing exceptional..

I visited JC Penneys briefly and their sales weren't very good and by no coincidence, their store was pretty much dead.  Same with Sears.. really hardly any shoppers and a few salespeople had looks of utter boredom for lack of people to help...

The only store with any busyness was Macy's and there was a long line of computer nerd geeks waiting to buy some gaming console at the video game store inside the mall.

Really it was nothing like I expected Black Thursday/Friday..

Not feeling like devoting my entire evening and late-night to shopping, I headed home.. Traffic was quite mild.. Much worse at 4:30p weekday than anything I experienced to and fro..

So I was thinking on my experience that night into the rest of the weekend and had some observations...

1) If the rest of the nation was like where I live which is a major US city, Black Thursday will have to go down as an unmitigated disaster for retail stores whether they publicly admit it or not..

Basically all they did was divert their Friday holiday traffic and took away the specialness of the retail shopping day which by many used to be seen as an 'Event'

Last year, sales on Thanksgiving Thursday totaled $810 million which sounds great but sales dropped 1.8% to $11.2 billion on Black Friday

In other words opening 6-12 hours earlier didn't attract new shoppers.. It just took away the urgency of getting up at the crack of dawn and the rush of the unique experience.

Based on Thursday night at my local mall and thingsI've read over the last six months to a year, it would not surprise me in the least if JC Penneys and Sears both file for bankruptcy protection in 2014.  Whether or not its a restructuring of debt or the beginning of liquidation remains to be seen..

Also been reading the Ruby Tuesday restaurant chain is in serious financial disarray so if you are to buy gift cards for Christmas, probably best not to invest in that restaurant or the previously mentioned retail chains.  In a bankruptcy, the store is not legally obligated to honor their gift cards.

2)  You will see stores become more and more desperate with more and more pretend sales to try to draw people in to shop..

It really is both frustrating and in a way rather offensive how so many stores offered BS 'sales' this Black Friday..

For instance, Bed Bath & Beyond normally gives out 20% coupons for people to get items on sale..  So what was their Black Friday special?  --  Everything 20% off without a coupon.. BFD!

CVS usually offers 25% off regularly priced items on occasion which really isn't much of a sale since they mark everything up 20-30% vs WalMart and Target.    So what was their special? -- a 30% off coupon..  Wowww~

Macy's offered a coupon.. $10 off $25 or more purchased..  Great..  Oh wait.. its for clothing and some home items only.. Darn..  Oh wait again.. its for Sale clothing..  Rrrrr

Neiman Marcus had 20% off their sale price items thus making it 50% off..  Great right?   Well, when your mark up is 3-4x to begin with  and the sale is what you'd pay regular elsewhere then not really..

Plus we looked today.. their sale items have gone down an additional 20% meaning instead of them offering X at say $200 then with 20% off being $160, now the item is simply $160...

Just one pretend sale after another..

We've been getting a lot of emails today for 'Cyber Monday'..  some like Amazon decided to start on a Sunday.  Others like Hastings Music & Video are making Cyber Monday a full-week event that ends Saturday..

I guess if stores like Hallmark can start selling Christmas ornaments in mid July then why not just celebrate a 'Friday' on a Thursday and a 'Monday' all week long..

And real shoppers know when the best sale values are..

For instance if you need an HDTV, the best sales come during Super Bowl week in mid-late January.   Winter clothing gets drastically cut after the New Year and if you needed a PC, the best deals were in late August with the back-to-school promos.

We here at A&G will trust you all to be smart consumers and to be on the lookout for the very best deals for both those you love and those you're obligated to buy for..

And remember, Valentine's Day is only 75 days away so shop early!

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