Black Friday & Bleak Saturday: Deals, Dropoff, and Death in the Retail Industry
This Black Friday turnout defied the dire predictions of most experts. The new concern now is whether the momentum will continue throughout the 2008 holiday shopping season. My personal observation on "Bleak Saturday" was that, so far, there is no momentum.
At the same Kohl's location Saturday morning, when the store's doors were unlocked for the 6 a.m. opening, two people got out of their cars and meandered inside. There was plenty of first-row parking at the J.C. Penney and Macy's entrances when they opened their doors early at 8 a.m. In fact, the only traffic or crowd I found on Bleak Saturday was at the last day of the Mervyn's bankruptcy liquidation sale.
In place of retail momentum in the 2008 holiday shopping season, so far we have retail mayhem. Yesterday a temporary Wal-Mart employee was trampled by shoppers who were so desperate for Black Friday bargains that they didn't notice they were stomping on a human being under their feet. I can't remember too many sentences I've hated to type more than that one.
If anything that we sell as retailers or purchase as consumers is more important than life itself, then the global financial crisis is the least of our concerns. No matter how desperate we all feel on both sides of the retail equation right now, I want to believe that as buyers, sellers, Americans, and human beings we all have a better set of values and priorities than this.
It's not like the last truckload of edible food in North America was delivered to the Long Island Wal-Mart on Black Friday before dawn. Someone would have to work hard to convince me that the acquisition of a low-priced plasma television could ever be justified as a life or death matter.
Collectively, it seems that we need to stop and take a breath. We owe at least that much to a 34 year-old man who left his Thanksgiving dinner to go directly to a temporary hourly wage job, and didn’t make it back home alive.
If we're going to do any purchasing on Cyber Monday, it should be to buy ourselves a copy of "It's a Wonderful Life." It might do us all good to pause and realize that we are all starring as George Bailey in our own real-life drama. Like George, we may have lost control of our life as it unravels around us, but also like George, we get to choose whether we curse the broken staircase spindle or kiss it.
Black Friday at the Long Island Wal-Mart shows how we can all deteriorate into the worst kind of residents in Pottersville. Despite whatever possessions we do or don’t have, is this the kind of people we want to be?
I completely agree. And if you think about it, we are the ones who got ourselves into this mess anyway. Spending money we don’t have, writing notes we don’t have, parents not teaching our children how to save and spend responsibly. And then this: The fact that we’ve created such a problem and are looking to the gov’t to solve it, so we all go crazy on deals and trample someone to death. I can’t believe it. I am a store manager for Hot Topic and just to think, hey, that could’ve been me. I have 2 amazing children, and I could’ve been killed over shopping!! We definitely need some sort of awakening here. But you also have to think about it like being at a concert. When you’re up front, near the stage, you can’t move yourself. There are so many ppl behind you pushing that you can’t control your body pushing forward. Not that this makes it right by any means, but to think about it that way, it doesn’t seem as bad. Because the ppl behind you can’t see that they are pushing you over someone and killing them. Ppl just kept on pushing forward, but they didn’t know what was in front of them. I’m so glad I wasn’t there. Like I said, I work retail, and I can’t stand shopping, so I would never be in those early bird lines anyway, but how terrible would it be to have to live w/ that? Thank you for your article. I appreciate that ppl feel as outraged as I do.
Jennifer
I agree with Jennifer. Us Boomers have only ourselves to blame for this mess. We created the exotic financial products and the opaque market within whcih they were traded. Us Boomers created the “Live Richly” ad campaign for Citi – that is, use your home as a piggybank to pay for vacations, college, cars, etc.
We live for today, saving less than 10% of our take-home pay.
That being said, I would like to see the profit figures for Best Buy, Walmart, Target, etc. Profits pay the bills. Sales don’t pay the bills. My personal experience was being in a suburban St Louis Best Buy at 10:00 on Black Friday morning with a light crowd. The sales clerk told me that the early morning crowd was “less than expected”. Yikes!