Recalling the “Black Friday by the Numbers” info-graphic that Permuto published last week, today I have decided to go back to the list of online retailers that have seen the best 2007 to 2008 growth in Black Friday audience reach, and see which of them are waiting until the actual Friday comes, and which are taking advantage of people’s holiday shopping mood, and their day off on Thursday (by the way, Happy Thanksgiving, America!).
It is this part of the Permuto’s graph that I’m referring to:
I’ve excluded two e-tailers: eBay because they are not your regular retailer (but mostly an auction platform), and CircuitCity (on obvious reasons). Out of the remaining eight, I’ve arrived at two lists: retailers that have made their Black Friday deals available on the Thanksgiving Thursday, and those that are waiting for the actual Friday to come.
Black Friday Deals Available on Thursday
- Amazon — “You shouldn’t have to stand in a long line to get a great deal”
- BestBuy — You can come to the store “at 5 am on Friday, Nov. 27… or, start shopping” online on Thursday!
- JCPenney — Black Friday “online screenbusters” (by analogy with “in-store doorbusters”) available on the Thanksgiving Day
- Sears – “Black Friday pricing available NOW on sears.com only”
Black Friday Deals Available on Friday (online or in-store only)
- Dell
- Kohl’s
- Target
- Walmart
Most of the retailers that tie the deals to the actual Friday, do run some “Thanksgiving deals” online, but shopping around and doing some price comparison, they are not even close to the markdowns that I see at the online stores of the merchants in the first group above.
Why would a merchant with an online storefront wait until 4 or 5 am of Friday morning, and not take advantage of the Thursday? I don’t know.
We were musing on Thanksgiving how a LOT of stores were starting their deals in-store on Thursday as well. It looks like Black Friday is seeping into the entire week, which is good for me… I went out just to run some errands on Friday and all the shopping centers were just MADHOUSES lol.
Interesting. I didn’t follow it much in brick-n-mortar stores (not a big fan of crowds), but this is definitely an interesting observation. Thank you, Trisha.
Additionally, it’s important to stress that the tendency to tease with “deals” which, in reality, were no deals at all was quite commonplace. A few days ago, I blogged about BestBuy.com’s Black Friday pricing vs TheNerds.net’s regular pricing, and found it interesting to see today’s PCWorld.com’s blog post on demystification of Cyber Monday deals. It appears that quite a few of the “bargains” weren’t such if you had the time to compare them with competing merchants.