Black Friday Sales (1 Viewer)

[Chris Lockwood]

> If it were true that opening stores at 5 am are turning off a lot of shoppers, then there wouldn't be lines, a mile-long just to get into these stores.

And those crowds would be bigger if the store opened at a civilized time like 9 or 10.

You can't tell me that MORE people are willing to show up in the middle of the night than at a more normal time.

 

[Mitch Stevens]

I agree with you there, but think of all the problems this would cause. Already, by the time the last person standing in line gets into the store, they have already sold out of whatever it is that the last person was looking for. Hell, they sell it out everything even before the people in the middle of the line get into the store.

Now imagine that they open at 10 am and the lines are two miles long instead of just one... And the store sells out of everything good in about 15 minutes... Think of all the unhappy people waiting in line for nothing.

 

[Howard Cantor]

I went to the Walmart to get the $900 42" Plasma and the $170 17" LCD and by 5:45 they were giving out rain checks on both items. The electronics department had people lined up around the store for everything and anything they could get there hands on. It was insane. I have never seen that many people in a single store. I live in S. Fla and they actually had to close the streets to one of the malls because so many people showed up and this was by 6:30 am.

 

[Phil Tomaskovic]

I went to Best Buy around 8:30am on BF and was surprised how relatively empty it was. Of course the $390 laptops and $250 camcorders were gone, but I got all the things I wanted in software (free Norton bundle, free Nero, $50 Adobe Photoshop.Premiere Elements) and also got '24' season 2 & 3 dvdb sets for $19 each. 24 was an impulse buy.
SInce the Adobe was locked up, I was able to check out a t a short line in the PC department, but even the front check out lines were fairly short. I remeber a few years ago at 8am, the checkout lines wrapped around the whole perimeter of the store and snaked up and down several aisles.

Not sure why this was? Was it that all the 5am customers were gone? I think other years they opened at 6am, right?


After BB, I went to Target and Circuit City. Again very short lines; picked up a number of cheap dvds kids titles (Shrek 2, Robots, Harry Potter) at Target although some like Napoleon Dynamite were gone. Circuit City was a mess although I have never been impressed by their cd/dvd depts, usually always low stock; they also only had a few of their $199 camcorder special with a large line waiting for them.