Black Friday coming

Before the early morning craziness begins and lines of shoppers rampage through stores, one last look at the holiday season outlook. This one by WSJ(subscription maybe required) speaking about the cautious approach to markdowns by most retailers. It might seem like the weakening economy might propel retailers to do faster and steeper markdowns but they are using IT tools to slim their inventory and use past data to forecast demands and perform more planned markdowns - "The industry has embraced price-optimization software that looks at past sales trends to determine where to set the initial price and when to trigger markdowns. The aim is to help store managers avoid panic-driven discounting if early sales are weak". It looks like apparel is one area where steeper markdowns might be seen cites the article - "Clothing is a prime candidate for more discounting as warm fall weather has discouraged purchases. John D. Morris, a specialty retail analyst at Wachovia Capital Markets LLC who tracks sales racks at clothing stores, says there were 5% more in his latest survey than a year ago". On the other hand high end speciality retailers are bucking the markdown trend and figuring out ways to increase traffic - "The most upscale stores, whose shoppers appear to be least threatened by the slowing economy, are eschewing discounts in favor of testing ways to increase store visits.". Some of them are offering gift items for bigger purchases.