Day after Black Friday

As reports trickle in about the performance of various retailers about their performance on Black Friday some interesting finds through anecdotal findings and expert opinion where reported in this article on WSJ. Some key takeways,

• "Based on early feedback, Friday's results likely matched expectations for flat customer traffic but small growth in sales" - It will be interesting to see if this is just an effect of retailers being cautious on how much to discount by resulting in the average ticket sales to go up a little.


• As per one of the Accenture experts cited in the report - "It looks like retailers are hoping to make up margin dollars on the higher-margin items while pushing smaller products at deep discounts" - Sounds contradictory to me considering that the big lines on the electronic item shops was for big ticket high margin items like HD TV and Notebook computers


• "Some retailers highlighted cheaper merchandise in their ads this year, giving cautious spenders more of a reason to show up. Best Buy, for example, devoted the front of its advertising circular to products such as a Dynex 32-inch LCD HDTV, discounted to $449.99 from $749.99. Last year, Best Buy's ad for Black Friday gave more prominent billing to TVs that cost $1,000 and more." - This is a no brainer. I think retailers would have had to do this to attract more traffic.


• Some interesting numbers on online sales - "Online sales hit $52.9 million on Thanksgiving, on 1.09 million orders, according to the Chase Paymentech Pulse Index, which tracks payments generated by 10 of the top 30 U.S. Web merchants as ranked by Internet Retailer magazine. Last year, online sales reached $42.3 million, and 863,880 orders were processed" - considering the fact that store traffic was flat, this may come out impressive.

Lastly my own anecdotal report on this years Black Friday. I resisted the urge to go to Best Buy but the more I looked at the Sony laptop deal, inspite of heavy lunch, I dragged my self out to a nearby Best Buy in Kennesaw, GA. Reaching there made me realize that I moved 5 hrs too late. The below picture was taken at 10 pm on Thursday (pardon the bad quality). I wasnt surprised though with the outdoor tents and the gas burners used by enthusiasts to keep them warm