So?
The point is what the consumer wants, not “Who is REALLY in the red here?” There’s nothing wrong with stores making a profit.
She saw a jacket. She’s waiting. She wants it. It’s a good deal right now (compared to what it cost beforehand).
My sister was one of those Best Buy line people and got her kid an Xbox 360 w/ Kinect for $199. So I assume she saved money. She bought some games as well but she’d have done that even if she spent $300+ on the system.
I have never understood Black Friday or why anyone would go to the store or shopping mall and camp out and shit and then beat the door in when it is finally unlocked.
That’s just lunacy. Personally, I am going to wait until a week or two before the holiday and prepare for it. It’s not a big deal. The economy sucks now and those deals are going to be there on December 15th at 2 in the afternoon. What is such a rush to buy? One of those stupid tablet things? Again, the economy blows monkey balls and I assure you that retail has more than enough crap to sell since no one has bought anything all year round.
Update: my jacket is now sold out in my size, at least online. 
I might still be able to pick one up in a retail store, if they haven’t been completely picked over by the Black Friday crowd. Also, the price has gone back up to $39.00. I do think this demonstrates that for this particular item, purchasing on Black Friday would have been the right move.
I agree that the key is to know what you want, comparison shop, and not allow yourself to be distracted by all the bright, shiny things. Since I don’t carry a credit card, and pay for everything with the limited amount of cash that I have on hand, this is not a problem for me.
On a related note, I just had an excellent idea for what to do with the police who’ve been giving Occupy Wall Street such a hard time.
I think my problem is more with advertising and the human mind and greed. If it cost $9.45 to purchase and your cost of just doing business to sell that product is, say $10.00, then selling it at any price above $19.45 means profit for the business on that item. So why start at $59.00? So that when you drop the price (50% OFF !!!) to $28.50, it looks like you are giving the customer a “good deal”. Why isn’t $9.05 profit (that $28.50 price) good enough to begin with? I’m not opposed to people making a profit in their business-but what is a “reasonable” profit?
In my sister’s (and mother’s) case, they just find it fun. I guess it’s not any stupider than waiting in a long, cold wintery line for football tickets or blowing a few hundred bucks on a game or concert you’ll see once and it’s done. At least she got an Xbox 360 out of it.
I think the scam, if there is one, is the artificially inflated prices. I bought a king sized microfiber down-alternative comforter for $20. I am happy with it and I wanted it for the new king bed we’re getting for our new house. But I know that I bought a cheap comforter, and there’s no way the comforter is worth the $160 retail price tag on it. That’s just absurd! A little Googling finds comparable comforters in the $45 range. So I “saved” $25- not $140. But in reality I spent $20 on something I sort of needed, nothing more.
In a crazy moment I considered getting 2- why not! They’re so cheap! But I don’t need or even really want another one. I felt sucked in by Black Friday. I didn’t get another one.
Reasonable profit is selling at the optimal price, which is the price at which you make the most money. This can be expensive so that you sell one unit at a massive profit or it can be very cheap so that you sell 1,000 units at a minimal profit on each. It’s a calculated strategy where you attempt to make the most amount of profit for the store as a whole. Some products are loss leaders, others are almost all margin.
So why would that item normally sell for $59 when the cost is so low? It could be that they want the extra profit on this one item so they can be competitively priced on another. The retailer I work for has a number of items that we regularly make negative margin on - otherwise people won’t buy them. So is it not fair that we price other items higher so we can be margin positive on the transaction? If you don’t think so, feel free to vote against our strategy with your dollars.
I can tell you that with the deals we advertise for black friday, we almost always lose money. We hope to make it up in funding from our vendors (either money for each unit sold or a lower average cost) or attached items but most of the time we don’t. We accept this as the price of doing business on this day.
interface2x, retail pricing analyst
except, the thread wasn’t a poll asking if you shop on black friday, so your post was pointless. (kind of like this one)
I’m surprised that’s legal to be honest. Actually, from what I know of acceptable US retail practices etc, I’m not in the least surprised- but surely there should be some sort of legal requirement that stores have sufficient stock on hand for reasonably anticipated demand?
The problem is “reasonably anticipated demand” on, say, a TV that’s been marked down to $200 when it regularly retails for $500 is damn near everybody. That said, I believe there minimum amounts of sale-priced items and I think it’s 5-10.
That’s understandable then- I was thinking of an earlier post comment about someone saying “at least three in each store” and I was thinking “I’m pretty sure that’d be considered bait advertising here, depending on the item”.
I’m not expert on the topic but I think the inclusion of “at least three” would mean it is not actionable bait advertising because even a well informed amoeba is not going to be misled because they are going to realise that on sale day, these three are going to be gone in seconds.
The advertising become misleading where there is a sale item advertised at a very low price (with no quantity qualification) in a “week long sale” and there is no way there is going to be a enough stock to go the full week.
Fair comment. In my retail career I’ve certainly had to make my share of calls to other stores to get stock when a catalogue has come out unexpectedly and it’s been realised that the Massively Popular Widget we never have in stock is on the front page of a 2-week catalogue for even cheaper than usual, lest we incur the wrath of the Department of Fair Trading.
To be fair, that’s universally been through a lack of communication or other circumstances rather than design, but I have no doubt There Would Be Consequences if it turned out a business- especially one which is in a position to print catalogues- was doing the wrong thing.
Well my point was that I think it’s something of a scam, or at least not a good enough deal to be worth going, so I avoid it. I figured that given the thread title, that could be implied from my short post. It’s hardly the first time someone has posted a tangential point in a thread; do you make sure to step in and insult all of the others as well?
Most of the Black Friday hype you hear is nonsense. The media loves reporting on it, because otherwise, it’s a very slow news day: everyone’s staying at home, all the football games were yesterday, and there’s just nothing else to report on. So, since everyone has the day off, why not whip the public into a shopping frenzy?
Even the crazy stories you hear about people getting pepper-sprayed and such are absurd, because those things happen every other day as well, but on other days, they’re ignored. Why would the media bother reporting on some nut in a store? They have bigger stories to push. Except on Black Friday, when nothing else is going on.
That being said, I did go shopping on Black Friday. I went to Walmart at 10 on Thursday, saw how crazy it was, and left empty-handed. After a good night’s sleep, I picked up a few things from Best Buy and Target at around 1 in the afternoon like a sane person. Oh, and I bought one or two things online, because apparently lots of folks don’t realize that many of the deals apply to internet sales too.
It depends on what you shop for and how you shop. Between Black Friday and Cyber Monday and sale/coupon/rebate stacking, I got just shy of $600 of stuff from Kohls for $175 (both figures include Ky sales tax). Granted, that $600 is full retail pricing, which I never pay if it can be avoided. More typical sale pricing through the year would have been in the $350 range, so I really only saved $175 over other sales. But it’s still about half off typical sale pricing and hey, $175 is nothing to sneeze at. Besides, compared to your typical BF/CM shopper I did very little shopping.
Mind you, that buck and three-quarters wouldn’t have been sufficient inducement to a) get up in the wee hours b) drive 2 hours to the nearest store c)fight the traffic to get to that shopping center and d) fight the crowds in the store. I did my shopping on the couch in my underpants like a normal person. But I don’t really think whether the deals are good enough to make dealing with the crowds worthwhile is a good rubric of whether or not something is a good deal. I mean, I wouldn’t go to my local Walmart on BF if they were giving out gold ingots and oral sex and paying you for the privilege, but that doesn’t mean free gold isn’t a hell of a deal.
It used to be the Canadian version of Black Friday was Boxing day Sales. Every store would clear out anything that hadn’t sold during the Christmas panic at great prices. I used to go until the year I was tackled by a lady who REALLY wanted the sweater I was holding. I decided after that it just wasn’t worth the crowds.
Of course now we’ve embraced your sales too so we have many many options for suicidal shopping.
I feel the same way; if you want to wait in line to save money, more power to ya, but I’ll pay the extra $100 regular price and we’ll consider it the “don’t have to wait in line for 9 hours and possibly not even get the item” fee.
With that said, I can’t see how it’s a “scam,” though one thing that online retailers sometimes do irks me a little. They’ll display the savings from limited-time BF pricing as off the MSRP, even if the regular everyday price is much lower and nobody pays the MSRP anywhere. So for example, the MSRP of an item might be $100 even though you can get it anywhere on any day for $75. They’ll take an extra $10 off and mark it as a 35% off sale when it’s really only a 13% sale.