I know, you’ve probably heard stories of big crowds at the stores for “Black Friday” – but those initial stories are probably put out by people hoping to boost the retail stocks on Monday in order to make a short-term killing off the suckers. The reality is more grim:
Retailers succeeded in enticing deal-hungry shoppers into their stores on Friday, but at the checkout lines many people were sticking to the most deeply discounted items.
That may prove to be a disappointment to executives at the nation’s major chain stores, which have been battered by the recession. Many have been hoping that, once in the stores, consumers would spend a little more freely than they did a year ago.
Ask yourself – what did you do? The Mrs is picking up a new hobby and so I went to a particular store to obtain items she’ll need for it. The first item I actually bought about ten days go – I think it was discounted 30%. That was the biggest-ticket item on the list. Next up were two $89.00 items. One of them I got for $29 as a “door buster” (and I busted that door at the crack of 11:30am…still a dozen of the items left). The other was also listed for $89, and I used the nifty 50% coupon. It was $389.00 plus $89.00 twice, or $567.00 worth of stuff for about $343.00. There is one more item to get, but it wasn’t discounted nor did I have another coupon – so, it’ll sit on the shelf until I do get that discount, or it won’t be purchased at all.
So, any of you out there pay full price for an item yesterday? I don’t think too many people were out there buying the full priced items – my bet is that while the volume of items sold was probably pretty good yesterday, the amount of money spent was significantly less than last year. And that is going to kill retail profits for the year. But, in the nature of modern times, I do expect an “I heard good news stories about Black Friday” stock run-up on Monday to counterbalance the really serious news out of Dubai. This is because there are two sorts of people in the stock market these days – sharks who are fleecing the suckers, and suckers who are hoping against hope that everything is back to normal.
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