Akkam’s Razor

Black Friday looks to be so weak this year, that some retailers are starting their sales early, such as Kmart.

For those unfamiliar with the terminology, here’s Wikipedia’s entry for Black Friday:

Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving in the United States, is historically one of the busiest retail shopping days of the year. Many consider it the “official” beginning to the Christmas shopping season. The “black” in the name comes from the standard accounting practice of using red ink to denote negative values (i.e., losses) and black ink to denote positive values (profits). Black Friday is the day when retailers traditionally get back “in the black” after operating “in the red” for the previous months.

Now, releasing stores’ Black Friday offers can be quite disruptive to both their marketing plans and bottom lines, but that doesn’t stop people using the “lawless” internet from doing it anyway. Every year has brought several successful attempts by retailers (and an army of lawyers) to issue cease-and-desist letters to intimidate the operators of websites to pull the information. This year, it appears that most retailers are resigned to their fates.

Note: I don’t know how these were acquired – I assume through legal and lawful mean. An attempt at an explanation is pure conjecture.

When looking at these scoops, you are left to wonder with “how’d they do it?” Retailers typically make their commitments as far as to their mix of products and price points in the late summer, and at the very latest in September. These items will typically start showing up in retailers’ computers and store shelves throughout the month of October. So how does this information get out so quickly? There is one of three scenarios:

1. Someone “hacks” into the stores’ (all of them) computers and retrieves the data (possible, but highly improbable).
2. Employees of various chains gain access to upcoming sales items and distribute them across the internet where it is aggregated in various places. (Slightly more probable, but still unlikely.
3. People working in the circular stuffing operations at the local newspapers collect the data, which is later put on line.

It’s this last possibility that’s most likely. The circulars that each retail chain uses are printed up weeks before they are actually in customers’ hands. Furthermore, newspaper chains typically pre-prepare the Sunday paper packets a couple of weeks prior to distribution. This is a job that a computer savvy youth would be extremely likely to have, paying $7-8 dollars per hour). From there, they can take the ads home, scan them, and place them online.

The early predictions (via WalletPop) seem to include ultra-cheap laptops and netbooks, lower price-points on HD TVs, $100 GPS units, digital photo frames, and ultra-cheap Blu-ray players.

On the other hand, if the orgy of consumption somehow contradicts with the darkening economic landscape, then you can participate (or not, as the case may be) in Buy Nothing Day.

Here’s a handful of sites covering Black Friday and “Cyber Monday” with scanned ads, lists, and scooped deals:

• BFads
• BlackFriday.biz
• Black Friday Ads
• Black Friday Info
• Cyber-monday
• Dealnews
• Black Friday at Gottadeal
• TheBlackFriday.com

The article intimates that they (Walmart) didn't discount as deeply as they normally do. As a result, their Black Friday traffic had slipped at the end of the week.

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Last year, almost all of the advertised specials for Black Friday were all over the web by this time. It appears that the merchants have learned from those mistakes, as there is not as much info online.

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Shamelessly stolen from Shakespeare's World:

This years Best Buy Black Friday Deals:

This years hard drive deal: Maxtor 120GB 7200RPM Internal HD w/8MB Buffer - $50 A/R

This years video card deal: ATI Radeon 9600 128MB - $70 A/R

This years monitor deal: Samsung 17" LCD Monitor - $280 A/R