Black Friday and Cyber Monday have come and gone, kicking off the 2007 holiday-shopping season...apparently in full force.
As you are probably aware, Black Friday is the term in the U.S. for retail shopping on the Friday after Thanksgiving, and Cyber Monday refers to online shopping on the Monday following Thanksgiving.
These have become milestone shopping days that retailers use as indicators for the health of the holiday-shopping season. While they are often referred to as the busiest or even biggest shopping days, they are quite often trumped by other days leading up to Christmas.
Retail, probably more than any other business, seems to live and breathe on year-over-year and comparable-day sales comparisons. Ask even the smallest retailer you know how they are doing, and without a blink they can probably quote how the day, week, and month are stacking up compared with a year ago.
While economic conditions, weather, and countless other variables can greatly impact sales, I have to imagine that most retailers would feel like a high school football team losing their homecoming game if sales fell even slightly below the previous year. Nothing seems to soften that blow.
What really struck me this year, though, was hearing reports of malls opening at midnight and other stores opening up earlier than ever before. I couldn't help but wonder: how sustainable is Black Friday sales growth?
The National Retail Federation reported that Black Friday weekend traffic was up 4.8 percent over last year, but average consumer spending was down 3.5 percent from last year. The NRF projects that holiday sales will rise 4 percent, though, so perhaps it will all be worth it when all the numbers add up after the season has come and gone.
But in the back of my mind, when I start thinking about extra staffing, overtime pay, holiday pay, and perhaps even lower gross margins or even losses on some of the door-buster specials, I wonder what the result of net sales is and whether it is really all worth it? How quickly will the point be reached when you can't open any earlier, drive any more store traffic, or offer enough hot deals to justify it all?
Enter Cyber Monday
Based on survey research from Shop.org, this fact isn't lost on retailers. While Black Friday won't be disappearing anytime soon, many retailers are looking to how they can further tap into the online market to drive sales. I'm sure their data includes retailers that are strictly online-based, but seeing how 72.2 percent of them planned special promotions for Cyber Monday, up from 42.7 percent from two years ago, online holiday sales look to have a pretty solid future.
And if those numbers don't indicate retailers' interest, perhaps the prime-time TV commercial I watched while writing this does. It was for a very well-known national electronics retailer with over 600 retail stores in the U.S. alone, yet the commercial focused solely on its Web site.
Perhaps the number that has online retailers already smiling this year though was from the Shop.org survey that revealed that 72 million Americans--11 million more than last year--planned to shop online this past Monday. Maybe next year more shoppers will measure the shopping season based on remaining online shipping days than store shopping days, and more retailers will start planning their holiday calendar around SEO.
The economy's not as bad as you might think, and this Black Friday is going to prove it, says one researcher.
"Retailers will come out OK" on one of the biggest shopping days of the year, said Joseph Haslag, economist at the University of Missouri-Columbia. "The numbers may not be great; they won't be horrible. There won't be any reason to walk away from Friday's numbers thinking the economy is in dire straits."
Predictions like that ought to make retailers sleep a little easier. On Tuesday, one of them, the nation's largest video gamer retailer, GameStop, said it was anticipating a disappointing holiday sales season. Luckily, Haslag says holiday season and Black Friday sales don't make or break the U.S. economy, which is still growing at a 2.5-percent clip. It's not as robust as the 3-percent growth the nation saw between 1995 and 2005, but it's not terrible, either.
No matter what, retailers are still slashing prices left and right, particularly in the consumer electronics realm. Check out this gallery on some of the best deals before, during, and after Black Friday.
Editor's Note: If you've stumbled across this page looking for the latest on Black Friday laptop deals, we've rated many of the 2009 Black Friday bargains here.
Like opening weekend box office numbers to Hollywood bean-counters, the weekend shopping extravaganza known as Black Friday is read as tea leaves for the rest of the holiday shopping season (even though these initial impressions are not as accurate as they used to be).
But will it run Crysis?
Besides door-busting deals on big-screen TVs and digital cameras, one of the most-watched categories is laptops, where eager bargain hunters are looking for a sub-$500 deal. While we generally say that most super-inexpensive laptops are too underpowered to be worthwhile, Black Friday gives us a chance to sample some more expensive systems at deep discounts--at least in theory.
In practice, what we're seeing this year is extremely low-end laptops discounted even more than usual. But a $500 turkey is still a turkey at $300. We'd rather see some more $999 systems lowered to $699 or so.
Best Buy will have a Toshiba Satellite A135 (including a printer) for $229 (20 per store). We looked at a $999 configuration of the A135 earlier this year, and liked it, but the configuration available at Best Buy is very different, and about as bottom of the barrel as possible (which makes this a good place to point out that PCs can be configured radically differently, even with the same name, so shop carefully).
Even for less than a Nintendo Wii, the Intel Celeron CPU is a deal breaker, although the 512MB of RAM, 80GB hard drive, and Vista Basic OS all seem acceptable for a budget machine.
At least it's not a Celeron processor.
(Credit: BFAds.net)Circuit City has a potentially better deal, offering a Compaq Presario with a similarly dated Intel Pentium T2310, which is at least a dual-core CPU, plus 1GB of RAM. But we still wouldn't expect much in the way of performance.
Dell is offering a low-end laptop from its Vostro line of small business PCs for $399, about $100 less than its normal price. The Vostro 1000 is saddled with a 1.7GHz AMD X2 dual-core CPU, but at least has 1GB of RAM and a decent 120GB hard drive. Also, Vostro systems offer extra customer support services from Dell, always a plus.
Wal-Mart will be offering an Inspiron 1501 laptop for $598. While the AMD X2 dual-core CPU wouldn't be our first choice, the 2GB of RAM and Vista Premium make this a decent deal. We spec'd out the same components for around $750 on Dell's Web site.
Spending a little more might be worth it.
(Credit: BFAds.net)Our main problem with recommending any of these low-end Black Friday deals is that with dated, underpowered components, most buyers will be left unsatisfied with their system's performance. Even if used for just running basic Web and productivity apps, a modern Windows Vista system requires a certain amount of computing horsepower overhead to run efficiently, and a shopper's expectations may not be in line with the laptop they're buying.
Our current favorite bargain laptop is perfect for those who just want to surf the Web and work on office documents. It's not part of any Black Friday deals, but the Linux-powered Asus Eee PC doesn't try and act like a full-priced laptop, and for $399 makes for a perfect secondary or backup system. And, if you're looking to spend a bit more, Michelle Thatcher just put together an in-depth shootout of $1,000 laptops that may be better bargains than some of these so-called deals.
[Kudos to BFAds.net for compiling and scanning the various retailers' ads.]
If you thought you could escape this Blu-ray and HD DVD format back-and-forth nonsense, well, you were wrong. It's actually just beginning! This holiday season, both sides in the next-generation DVD battle are continuing to ratchet up the pressure on you lucky consumers.
(Credit:
Blu-ray Disc)
Exhibit A: The folks over at Wal-Mart have followed up their boffo $98 Toshiba A2 HD DVD player with a pretty impressive overture for Blu-ray. Buying an 80GB Sony PlayStation 3 this Saturday will also get you 10 Blu-ray movies for free, as long as all the titles are below $30. (Go to the Wal-Mart holiday shopping site and click "Preview Saturday's Specials.") That's in addition to the five Blu-ray movies that Sony gives new owners with a mail-in rebate.
(Credit:
HD DVD)
So, just like that, you're buying a $499 next-generation gaming console and Blu-ray has you in its format clutches to the tune of 15 titles. Sooooo sneaky, right? Well, the HD DVD team's not above such retail tactics either.
Head on over to Amazon.com where you'll see a Toshiba HD-A3 HD DVD player and an offer for three free HD DVD movies (you choose from a list of titles between $20 and $30). That's in addition to 300 and The Bourne Identity that come bundled with the player. Plus, Toshiba also has a mail-in rebate good for five titles.
Sheesh, it's almost tempting enough to give in and buy one...or both.
It's happening again.
If you thought one minute past midnight the day after Thanksgiving was too early to choke out your fellow shoppers in the name of a great deal, you were wrong.
An Acer laptop will be one of the featured items offered at Black Friday-like prices Friday, November 2, in its stores.
(Credit: Wal-Mart)Following last year's decision to offer a $398 laptop several weeks ahead of the traditional Black Friday (the day after Thanksgiving), Wal-Mart is planning on slashing prices on five items--in its stores, not online--beginning at 8 a.m. this Friday. One of them will be a $348 Acer laptop with 1GB of RAM. The other four items and their prices will be kept secret until Friday morning when the sale officially begins. At that time, the prices will be available on the Wal-Mart Web site. The retailer will still hold a traditional Black Friday sale.
The secretive nature of revealing the pricing online at the very last second is likely an attempt to avoid what has become ritual among retailers and Black Friday fans. More and more, Black Friday Web sites have made it their business to reveal retailers' circular ads before they are officially published.
It's caused some retailers, like Wal-Mart, to threaten legal action. Earlier this month, Wal-Mart sent notices to 10 Web sites that the retailer says it will sue if the ads are published before November 19, the official release date.
But will the strategy of starting the holidays earlier and earlier bring more change to Wal-Mart's coffers? In past years, the evidence of success has been "mixed," according to consumer retail analysts. In general the lower-priced items do well, but products with higher price tags, generally over $500, are still a tougher sell.
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