bizarreville

Retailers across Bizarreville were high-fiving each other after what they viewed as a successful Black Friday shop-athon.  More shoppers than expected had flocked to the malls, creating that rich tradition of constipated parking lots, bumper-car shopping & shoving excursions, and of course the endless lines.  Many retailers adopted the new Black Friday tradition of minimizing sales staffing on that Friday so that checkout lines were especially long, creating the impression of huge crowds inside their store to any passers-by.  It all seemed to work, as crowds were near record-level.  Missing from their wild exuberence was one minor detail:  no one was spending much money.

Particularly hit by the shop/no-buy paradox was Eldberd’s House of Flatscreens.  Old Eldy has been in the TV business for 50 years, expanding bit by bit.  But recently he decided to go “All In” in the growing Flatscreen market and built a showroom the size of a football field – boasting 1000 Flatscreens of every permutation of size, pixel, Hertzage, techno-nonsense, and plasmology.  Even found some metric screen sizes for European wannabe’s.

Eldy opened his doors at 3am, with typical ads for 30% off one obscure model:  a 3700 millimeter, paisley-colored, 82 Hertz Bullshmitz LCD television, but only carried 2 total units in stock.  Naturally those were snarfed up quickly.  Many other disgruntled customers were surprised to find all his other models were at full or nearly full price…causing considerable grumbling and grouching as they were still wiping sleep from their eyes and wondering why in the  f*@!  did they set the alarm and wake up for “this”?  Nevertheless, they roamed the great Hall of Same to marvel at the units upon units, with few actually plunking down ten C-notes to garner one of these trinkets.  One woman approached a beleaguered sales associate with the question, “Which one would you recommend?”  The sales person was restrained from throttling her by several onlooking customers.

Someone forgot to tell Eldberd that this ain’t your father’s TV business anymore.  Eldy still remembers the day when the only new feature on the next year’s model TV was a slightly different color on the vinyl fake-woodgrain overlay.  They forgot to tell Eldy that his vast array of Flatscreen inventory would all be obsolete in less than 9 months…replaced with all-new models with obsolesence-creating zinkrofaddles and dorkuloids.  Poor Eldy doesn’t even know what a fankerfloyd does…tsk, tsk.

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.”