Black Friday off to the races with fresh new gamesmanship
Bizarreville retailers are off to a good fresh start on Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving when stores open up pre-dawn with hard-to-believe Door Opener specials, and lines of trembling shoppers camping out to get first dibs. With all the uncertainty in the economy, retailers were approaching this Black Friday with more trepidation than usual…and so did some special planning accordingly.
Retailers started by advertising more aggressively in the Thanksgiving Day newspapers. Rather than the typical 25% discount promotion with a few small footnote “exclusions”, they decided to go with 40% discounts with more extensive and creative exclusions in ultra-miniscule font size, easily readable with a 100X power microscope. One tricky retailer offered the 40% discount only to customers who came in the store wearing large panama hats with purple bandanas, but was surprised to see that half the nutballs in line had the stupid hats on. One customer had one with a blue bandana, and a heated argument ensued with the store manager over the definition of “purple”.
Stores have adjusted down their famous “Limited Quantities Available” promotional items from the typical 4 or 5 items down to 1 or 2 items, so they can execute the bait-and-switch shtick a little earlier. Meanwhile, they are bumping up the prices on the “switch” items to bolster margins, once the promo items are quickly snarfed up. It would seem that shoppers might be wary of these tricks, but the stores are offering free Extra Bold coffee to keep them in a manic, frenzy state so they miss the fine details of their pricing shenanigans.
Stores have spent more time training their sales and checkout employees on how to execute their Black Friday chicanery, with particular emphasis on how to play dumb, e.g. huh, I don’t know where that item is…huh, guess we sold out of it…huh, I don’t know what the ad says…huh, we don’t have a store manager here today so you’ll just have to talk to me…huh, if I try to give you a break, I’ll get fired. Reportedly, the trainees this year seem more adept than ever at learning the Play Dumb skill set.
Stores are still working schemes and strategies to try and unload the junky crap that’s been gathering dust since January on their shelves. One retailer said, “We could offer a 90% discount on this crud, and it still will be fermenting here. May just back up the truck and haul it off to the City Dump…or may just give it to our employees as sort of a ‘Christmas Bonus’…yeah, we’ll probably do that.”
Tags: black friday, hijinx, satire, shenanigans
This entry was posted on Friday, November 27th, 2009 at 4:04 pm and is filed under Street sweepings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
