Retail rolls out holiday deals early

Black Friday as a blockbuster shopping event has shown signs of fading away as several retailers rolled out their best Christmas holiday deals earlier this year and more consumers are finding what they want at comparable prices online year-round.

The thrifty consumer’s biggest shopping event of the year, the Friday and weekend after Thanksgiving, once signified the time when retailers’ profits turned to black from red. “Then retailers made it a sales day that ripped into those profits,” said Gene Detroyer, a professor at the European School of Economics, New York City campus.

“Today, it is all psychological,” he added.

Nikki Baird, managing partner at Miami-based Retail Systems Research, said Black Friday isn’t dead yet, but has appeared to have “jumped the shark” - a phrase used to describe a moment in which something that was once great begins to decline in quality and popularity. (The expression is derived from an episode of Happy Days in which the Fonz jumped a shark while water skiing, considered a lowpoint in the show.)

“Jumping the shark is that moment when you realize that the peak has already come and gone,” Baird said.

For starters, “Online retailers have gotten more and more savvy about capturing consumers while they’re [on the site],” Baird said. Detroyer said he is in charge of holiday shopping for his four grandchildren and that he does it allfrom his desk in about an hour and a half online.

In addition, nearly 100 of 200 holiday marketers surveyed recently by Experian Marketing Services said they planned to roll out their holiday promotions before Halloween. The majority of those queried said they had campaigns planned by August. The most popular time to launch campaigns overall is the first 15 days of November, right after Halloween but before Thanksgiving.

In some stores, Halloween and Christmas displays are running end-to-end.

“If you wait and put your best deals out by the first of November, you’re risking being late to the game,” Baird said. “There are these competitive forces at work that kind of force retailers’ hands. They’ve got to be out there sooner.”

Black Friday is “purely a store-based phenomenon,” she said. “Its time has come and gone. We just don’t need it anymore.”

Detroyer sees it a little differently.

The behavior of the consumer is changing, he said. Shopping is no longer an event; consumers are able to master their gift lists without the uniqueness of Black Friday.

“Every day there are more and more alternatives where the shopper can get what they want at the price they want,” Detroyer added.

Shoppers at Sam’s Club are already hearing Christmas music overhead as they stroll the warehouse retailer’s aisles. But it doesn’t mean Wal-Mart Stores Inc. will leap-frog over the Black Friday hoopla.

“For us, for over 50 years, Black Friday has always been a really important time for our customers,” said Wal-Mart spokesman Deisha Barnett. “They look at that entire weekend as an opportunity to get some great deals on merchandise for gifts and other things they need for themselves.”

The retailer said it saw larger Black Friday crowds last year than the year before, due in part to its first ever one-hour guarantee on some electronic items. The day included three events- at 8 and 10 p.m. and at 5 a.m. From 8 p.m. to midnight, Wal-Mart processed nearly 10 million transactions at the register with a rate of nearly 5,000 items per second. The world’s largest retailer sold 1.8 million towels, 1.3 million televisions, 1.3 million dolls and 250,000 bicycles.

So the company is not making many changes to its Black Friday promotional plans, Barnett said. “[Black Friday] continues to be an important time for us because it is such a highly competitive time in retail,” she added.

Wal-Mart announced Monday that it will hire 55,000 seasonal workers for the Christmas shopping season, compared with 50,000 seasonal workers hired for the same period last year. Another 70,000 employees will be moved from temporary positions to part-time work or transitioned from part time to full time. The extended work shifts will continue after the holidays.

Business, Pages 21 on 09/24/2013

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