Saturday, November 23, 2013

Shop at Kmart. Put turkey in oven. Bake pie.


Goodbye, Black Friday. Hello, Black Thursday.

So, Kmart is leading the pack. Opening at 6 am on THURSDAY, Thanksgiving Day.

So, you can switch off the alarm, run out to do some quick Christmas shopping at Kmart as the sun is rising, then rush home to put that big bird in the oven and start getting ready for brother Freddie and the kids who always come to your house for turkey and pumpkin pie….

And you can sleep in on Black Friday morning….

Why are the stores doing this?

The quick, easy, wrong answer is they're "serving the customer."

I think a more accurate answer is they don't know what else to do, and opening earlier and earlier is easy to do in their pell-mell quest for more Christmas sales, and yeah, it disrespects their employees but so what?

One commentator on Yahoo Finance notes that conspicuously profitable stores like Nordstrom and Costco are conspicuously NOT going to open on Turkey Day.

Why do many retailers endlessly persist in presuming that if they open more and more stores, and stay open for earlier and longer hours, their customers will spend more money in "my" store and spend less in "other" stores?

Think about your favorite store, and your main reasons for shopping there—is "store hours" high on your list? I think your average consumers pretty much have a Christmas shopping budget, and a limit, and WHEN they spend it is mostly irrelevant.

If  you're a Kmart shopper, are you going to spend more at Kmart this holiday season because you get a chance to stuff your cart and blow some cash at 6 am on Thursday morning before you start stuffing the bird?

Your average retail marketing VP is always looking for a proprietary, low risk, high profit, niche-creating, customer-loyalty-building gimmick to boost sales….and mostly they end up settling for the tired, easily duplicated, high profile, low payoff stunts that stir the revenue pot and don't do much else.

If you're in line at Kmart at 5 am next Thursday, you don't have to save a spot for me….







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