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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