Because wedding season slows down a little over the holidays, I decided not to write about the nice little reception we did at The Stockade Inn that I did over the weekend, and focus on “Black Friday” for this post.
First off, unlike the wedding I was the DJ for at there in Schenectady, there was nothing “nice”, nor “little” about this year’s Black Friday.
For the past 8 years or so, a friend of mine has been meeting up with me at the crack of dawn to run around like fools the day after Thanksgiving, looking at the deals at all the major stores in the area. However, the deal with this year’s Black Friday, in my opinion, was there were no deals.
It looks like Black Friday may have a very grim future and the downward spiral has begun.
NO LONGER JUST FRIDAY – I think this greedy move by retailers to try and get all of your holiday money spent at just their locationis going to backfire in the end. Target said, “lets open at 9pm on THURSDAY,” so Walmart opened at 8pm, with two other “sale events” kicking in later at midnight, then early in the morning on Friday.
Creating a “Gray Thursday” is a bad idea, in my opinion. This also grays the line for when Black Friday actually starts and creates lees of a sense of urgency on the buyer’s behalf. Why wake up at midnight or 5am or whenever for Black Friday sales, if places have already been open since immediately after you ate your pumkin pie the night before.
DOORBUSTERS FAIL – Sure there were a couple of bucks to be saved, here and there, but there were no real great saving doorbusters, as there were in the past. Since downloading media is huge now and you can just rent movies for $1 at the Red Box, CDs and DVDs at $5 really didn’t seem to be as big of a deal as they once were to everyone.
FLAT SCREEN FAIL – And on bigger ticket items, every store was pushing flat screen LED/LCDs. However, this can’t work forever because face it: PEOPLE CAN ONLY HAVE OWN MANY TVs! Once you have one in all the major rooms, you are done with this need. While some people may have taken advantage of this for this year, I think it must have been less than last year, and will continue to be less of demand by the consumer.
I noticed that many stores were trying to crank out LCD tv’s with deeper discounts than previous years for their Black Friday deals, but seemingly to no avail. Go into some of the stores like Best Buy, Target and Walmart and look at the huge stacks of crappy no-bame brand flat screens that people didn’t bother with like Emerson, Symphonic, and Dynex.
The reason for the size of these unpurchased piles of TVs is probably two-fold: 1) Most people who wanted a huge flat TV already have a flat screen by now, and 2) why buy a crappy brand, when you can spend a little bit more and have something with better quality?
I asked a guy at Best Buy why there were so many flat screens in a pile marked at $159. He said he didn’t know. Then I asked, “Do you know why they are called ‘Dynex’? …Because they die the next day!”
Anyhow, to make a long story short… I didn’t get anything at at all on black Friday, except for a pretty sweet omlette at The Wolf Road Diner in Colonie.
I just hope that next year, Black Friday doesn’t start before I eat my turkey. If so, stores will probably be serving cranberry sauce in line to the idiots waiting in line on White Wednesday for $9 thumbdrive.
