NEW YORK — In Manhattan’s trendy Soho district, Gap Inc.’s
Old Navy chain has a prominent window sign telling shoppers it’s open for
business on Thanksgiving Day. Across the street, the British retailer Topshop
promises early birds a free English breakfast Friday morning.
In fact, while retailers like Sears Holdings Corp. have been
touting their holiday-season offerings since as early as summertime, and
industry behemoth Wal-Mart Stores Inc. unfurled a Black Friday-style promotion
a week early, the jostling will come to a climax Friday with the official
kickoff of the industry’s most critical period. It’s called Black Friday
because it’s the date on which retailers are traditionally expected to become
profitable for the year.
Against the backdrop of a still-struggling U.S. economy
marked by a 26-year-high jobless rate, retailers from Target Corp. to Best Buy
Co. are opening their doors earlier than ever or making sure their
highest-profile specials, from the $3 slow cooker at Target to the $197
Hewlett-Packard laptop at Best Buy, are enticing and competitive enough to
drive traffic to their stores and set an upbeat tone for the season. Wal-Mart
has emphasized in its ads that it will match prices in any local competitor’s
print ad.
“You have to make your plan” for Black Friday
weekend, said Barclays Capital analyst Robert Drbul in an interview, adding
this weekend can be expected to generate 10 percent of total holiday season
sales. “It’s hard to play catch-up. A lot of what you are seeing (in terms
of store promotions) is surgical and tactical. It’s well-planned.”
While one day doesn’t a season make, Black Friday, as has
been the case for several years, is again expected to be the No. 1 shopping day
by both foot traffic and sales, generating 6 percent of the season’s turnover,
according to the store- and mall-traffic tracker ShopperTrak. And members of
about 26 percent of all U.S. households plan to shop on Black Friday, up from
24 percent in 2007, according to a survey by the International Council of
Shopping Centers and Goldman Sachs.
“It’s my single biggest day of the year,” said Jim
Fielding, president of Disney Stores Worldwide, in an interview, adding that
Disney is opening more of its stores at midnight and has done more advanced
media and publicity work this year to promote the opening. “This year it’s
a more proactive campaign. All retailers are looking at maximizing the
traffic.”
According to the National Retail Federation, a trade
organization, as many as 134 million people, 4.7 percent more than last year,
will shop this Friday, Saturday or Sunday.
Making the weekend’s sales even more crucial is survey
results indicating shoppers plan to make their holiday purchases earlier than
ever — a factor that has yet to reveal itself in November.
The International Council of Shopping Centers on Tuesday, in
fact, cut its November sales forecast to 4 percent to 6 percent growth from a
previous sales-growth projection of as much as 8 percent, according to the
council’s chief economist, Michael Niemira.
So far, while retailers face hospitable year-over-year
comparisons against their worst holiday season on record, the season’s ultimate
results remain an open question. Forecasters are not even agreed on the
direction of change from last year.
All the focus on Black Friday appears to have lessened the
importance of so-called Cyber Monday, the Monday after Thanksgiving that’s
viewed as marking the start of the online holiday shopping season. E-tail giant
Amazon.com Inc., for instance, launched a “Black Friday Deals Week,”
indicating how much time is left before a sale is closed and the percentage of
inventory sold, seeking to give shoppers a sense of urgency. Retailers have
increasingly put stock in the notion of private sales, sneak previews, and
limited-time and limited-quantity sales to connect with shoppers and loosen
their purse strings.
“Retailers have started to use the term Black Friday
not just as one day on the calendar, but as an adjective,” said Fiona
Dias, executive vice president of strategy and marketing for GSI Commerce,
which helps run Web sites and manage other Internet functions for about 200
retailers from Toys “R” Us Inc. to Polo Ralph Lauren Corp.
“Web (retailers) have woken up,” she said.
“What Amazon.com has realized is that if they wait till Monday, consumers
will be broke. … For online retailers to wait until Cyber Monday, they are
going to be out of the game.”
A case in point: According to online-payment site PayPal, a
division of eBay, its first major spike in online-payment volume occurred Nov.
16.
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The fervor over Black Friday has by now swept a swath of
unexpected retail categories, including PetSmart Inc., Home Depot Inc. and
Lowe’s Cos., that typically don’t rely heavily on holiday-season sales,
analysts said. Home Depot’s Web site, for instance, features a countdown to
Black Friday deals.
Those companies have “realized this brings out a lot of
people,” Michael Lasser, a Barclays Capital analyst, told MarketWatch.
“They realize: Why not participate in the event and have your message
tailored to the season when the shoppers are out? It’ll help sales.”
Crowd control is also expected to be a major focus this
Black Friday — with the death of a Wal-Mart worker, trampled by a
bargain-seeking mob at a Long Island store last year, fresh in the industry’s
collective mind. With its connotation of chaos, the very term
“doorbuster” appears to have been muted in 2009.
Wal-Mart will open a majority of its more than 3,500 U.S.
namesake stores — recently rebranded as Walmart — on Thanksgiving Day and keep
them open all the way through the beginning of the early-bird specials at 5
a.m. It also has indicated areas of the stores where shoppers can line up for
hot deals. Each store also has its own specific plan to handle crowd flow,
spokeswoman Daphne Moore said.
Rival Target for the first time also will offer store maps indicating
popular sale items for any shoppers waiting in line.
Consumer electronics, from flat-panel televisions to
so-called smartphones, and toys such as Zhu Zhu Pet fake hamsters will be big
Black Friday attractions, joined by appliances, small and large.
Coats and other outerwear will be among the key promotions
for apparel and department-store operators, analysts said. Retailers such as
Gap (GPS), for instance, will cut 50 percent off outerwear prices and offer
free Rock Band video-game guitars to the first customers in line at its Old
Navy chain.
Discount and department stores are expected to be the
biggest attractions, with about two-thirds of shoppers planning to head to
those big boxes, according to the NRF survey. Four in 10 plan to buy gifts at electronics
stores.
While overall discount levels throughout this holiday season
are expected to abate from last year as retailers across the board have
controlled inventory to reduce the need for profit-eroding discounts, Black
Friday specials are a different story, with retailers planning to be more
competitive than ever. A majority of the shoppers who told the NRF that they’re
planning to hit the stores this weekend also said they’d wait to see precisely
what retailers were offering.
“The deals this year are a little more
competitive,” said Michael Brim, founder of Bfads.net, which posts and
tracks retailers’ Black Friday advertisements. “Retailers are trying to
fight for the initial dollar.”
Via McClatchy-Tribune News Service.
