Black Friday Aftermath

So here we are 5 days after the Black Friday event.

Reports say that spending was down over 13% from last year, but was up about 2% when Thanksgiving Day sales are figured in. This of course, assumes that the stores were open on the holiday. Here in Maine along with Massachusetts and Rhode Island, most stores were closed until at least 12:01am Friday morning.

While I did not join the midnight crowd, I did go out around 11am that day. Here are just a few of my observations:

· It was easy to find a parking space everywhere. Apparently, many have already left most places and called it a day. While I had to sometimes park out a little further than usual, the parking was still plentiful.

· The ads were not great. Nobody had any really great doorbusters and many had just average discounts on many items. Even companies like Staples, which in past years, have had multipage ads; this year was limited to a 4 page ad. In fact, many of the items on sale at Staples were rebate items and not upfront sale prices. Also, on the back page, Staples offered a “buy 1 get 1 50% off on all ink cartridges”. However, in common Staples fashion, the blurb had a footnote attached to it which referred to the nasty small print at the bottom of middle pages. However, Staples definition of “all” as previously noted in a past post doesn’t mean all at all. Both HP & Epson cartridges were excluded from the sale. Nice job, Staples, by once again creating a false advertisement. When will they ever learn?

· Incompetent help was everywhere. Sadly, many of the seasonal associates were not properly trained and lines backed up because of this.

· One Walmart store I visited only had 4 registers open (yes you read that right) out of a possibly 25. This was around the 4pm hour when many people were shopping and the lines were around 20 people deep. To make matters worse, the cashier of the line I was in constantly forgot to give the correct change. She had her purse at the register looking for money to give the customer along with searching her pockets for change as well. Eventually a manager did come and open her drawer after wasting time doing her own personal search for money. In most other stores, this cashier would have been fired for this type of activity, however given that this was Walmart and they were so shorthanded they probably overlooked this problem.

· Poor placement of sales items in stores was another major problem for most of the stores I visited. Items of like types should be together, toys with toys, DVDs with DVDs etc. However, this was not the case as items were spread out all over the stores creating mass chaos as searching for some items was impossible and sometimes not worth the time. I probably would have spent more than I did if I could find what I was looking for. Don’t bother looking for help especially at Walmart and Best Buy as these stores lacked any salespeople on the floor.

Overall, I would say that this year I was underwhelmed by the whole Back Friday event. For a holiday period nearly a week shorter than normal, the stores seemed completely unprepared both staff wise and product wise. I believe that some retailers may have seen their last holiday season this year and that will be the discussion of a post in the very near future.