Black Friday "Amateurs" Rule
By Steve Smith -- TWICE, 12/4/2006
One old-style Vegas comedian whose shtick was about drinking — could have been Dean Martin or maybe Ed McMahon — said, "I don't drink on New Year's Eve. That's for amateurs."
That has been the philosophy of several what I call "professional" shoppers that I know — friends and family including my wife — who never ply their trade on Black Friday.
My "pros" begin shopping after Labor Day, wait until many retailers panic and cut prices further as Christmas approaches and in recent years, just go online and hunt for bargains there.
Based on all the reports about this Black Friday, the "professionals" were the extreme exception, and not the rule.
Ironically yours truly traditionally never has much time to do Christmas shopping between Thanksgiving and Christmas, given TWICE's preparations for CES in early January. But during the past few years I've ventured out on Black Friday to get a reality check on how this industry will do for the holidays.
This year I began to get a reality check during Thanksgiving at my home where much of the talk was about HDTV — formats, sizes, pricing, etc. One nephew of ours not only convinced his wife that they "needed" an HDTV for their new family room, he pushed the envelope (and looked for his uncle's moral support) to buy a 50-inch versus a 42-inch.
As for the children in attendance there were five under the age of 15. I asked if PS3 was better than Xbox and if they liked Wii. Well, after a couple of the kids tried to hit their uncle up for a new game system, a couple of them said to my surprise, "Wii is great because it has a cool controller."
Black Friday featured perfect shopping weather, here in New York and in most of the country. Over the years I've gone to the same two stores in Queens on that day — Best Buy on Northern Blvd. and P.C. Richard & Son on Steinway Street. In the words of one Best Buy shopper, "I've never seen this store this packed!" I would add, "On a Black Friday."
To give you an idea, I had to park two blocks away from Best Buy because the parking lot was packed. It was almost the same situation at P.C. Richard.
Many retail and shopping pundits said in the past month that, "There are no 'must-have' products in CE this holiday season." Is no product a "must-have" if just about every product is one? Every consumer electronics product seemed to be a "must have" — from iPod docks, digital cameras and camcorders, to the typical Black Friday low-end giveaways to HDTV — based on what I saw that day and heard what went on nationwide.
So it looks like this holiday season will be the one where HDTV becomes a mass market item. But many suppliers and retailers shouldn't be too quick to pat themselves on the back just yet. To get the massive traffic they cut prices dramatically and left plenty of profits on the table.
But that's a subject for another day. Suffice it to say that on Black Friday this year so-called "amateurs" ruled.
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