I have not physically participated in Black Fridays in perhaps even 10yrs, and always have used online shopping if available, but today we went out. We did not line up in front of superstores at 7am, but we took our time and left home at about 10am.
First observation - event is overhyped. There were no crowds much larger than usual. While most people, including myself, shop for technology, stores like JYSK were empty in spite of having no-tax event at the same time. I use this time of the year to do technology acquisitions and upgrades as many items go on sales and clearances. End of year is good time to get rid of stale inventory and fish the customers on the bait, although in Canada even fishing has rules called Canadian Code of Advertising Standards. Another good time to upgrade is January/February as many people overspend in Nov/Dec, the Jan/Feb are very quiet for technology vendors and they still need to get paid, so many technology items are available during this time at very deep discount and it's not as annoyingly hyped as Black Friday or Boxing Day so no ultra-limited stock or elbowing through the crowds.
First stop - Walmart. Wife wanted Tassimo T46 as her Christmas present and they had the best deal in town on the widget. Store was busy but not crowded, stock was sufficient. I also checked the electronics section for Lexar 32GB USB drive for $14.xx I seen in the flyer, found it and it scanned at $35. I thought it was a pricing mistake, but the shop clerk said the sale items were already out and these are regular price items. I did not dispute, plenty of fish in the sea. #1 - Bait and Switch. The blatancy of this is, they had stock of exactly same item about 3hrs after sale started selling it at regular price. If this is not B&S, then nothing is.
Stopped in Canadian Tire to pick up few jugs of synthetic oil. Busy, not crowded, sufficient stock of item I wanted. Staff somewhat annoyed. Did you notice Canadian Tire radio ads about having "lowest prices of the year" ? This is a blatant lie as pretty much every item on my watchlist of some 10 items were sold at greater discounts during the year. #2 - Price Claim violations and Comparative Advertising violations
Note: Canadian Tire employs the marketing technique where they mark-up many items significantly and run them on deep sale periodically relying on customers to buy other stuff while in the store. This is a legitimate selling technique as long as there is a much longer time of product being sold off-sale than on-sale, many supermarkets employ similar scheme, but CanadianTire is notorious. You can register on their website and add item you will need in the future into your watchlist and you get notification when it goes on sale. Especially their own store brands all go on sale. Give it 1-3 months.
Fast forward several stores, we ended in Target. I was interested in Microsoft Xbox 360 for $130 that included $40 Target gift card. Turns out they only received 2 units for entire event for 100,000 square feet facility. I wonder how many hundred people drove there just for this item. #3 - Bait and Switch.
I must applaud some stores for putting up a note about certain high-demand items being already sold out right at their entrance. It does not prevent people from driving there, but at least shows some effort to save people's time, perhaps their marketing campaign was not all about bait the customer then switch them to something more expensive.
