Does Black Friday actually exist?

Today is Black Friday. This is something that obviously started in the United States as the sales on the day after Thanksgiving. It makes sense there as it is something that is the equivalent to the UK sales that used to start in the New Year when I was a kid and now start on Boxing Day (or earlier.)

But rather than a genuine sale where retailers get rid of stock they couldn't sell in the run up to Christmas (or Thanksgiving in the US) these are marketing gimmicks that are used to shift goods at the right time. This leads me to ask the question-

Does Black Friday actually exist?

I mean this in the sincerest of senses. Black Friday as a day of sales does not really exist in the United Kingdom. What does exists is two forces that work together to make a great day to sell products for retailers but doesn't do a great deal for customers. We will have a look at the two forces below-

People only have a limited amount of money to spend on Christmas

Now I know that the sentence above might not feel true at times when you watch people leave stores with armfuls of goods day after day from the start of the Christmas season when Halloween finishes right through until closing time on 24th December.But once all the presents are bought for all the people they have to buy for then the vast majority of people stop.

So Black Friday is a great opportunity for retailers to get in there as soon as they can. If they become the first port of call for people when they are making their Christmas gift purchases then they stand a better chance of a bigger slice of the pie. If you leave your Christmas events until the week before the big day then you will end up missing out on all the consumers that bought on Black Friday.

The earlier you get people to spend their money with you then the less chance they have of spending it anywhere else. It makes sense in this way. But when you factor in the other force at play then you can quickly realise that this doesn't necessarily lead to bargains.

What constitutes a sale item

You look at a product. the retailer tells you is used to be at a higher price and you think that you are getting a bargain. That's how it works, isn't it? But many retailers are playing games with consumer at this time of year. For an item to be described as being in a sale it has to have been sold at a higher price for a certain period of time somewhere in that company.

And that is where the games can start. If Company A lists a product for sale on their website at £50 in the summer for that qualifying period of time then they can cut the price for Black Friday and call it a sale. They may have had no intention of selling any at the higher price. The newly-quoted sale price might be exactly what they were always intended to sell it for, but because they have played the game they can call this a sale item and hook customers that might have normally walked past.

So as a consumer, check out the sale prices and see if they represent value to you. If you are a retailer then play straight with customers and stop the games.

See why missing prices labels lose you business

I went out shopping to an out of town retail park yesterday and repeatedly faced one of my pet retail peeves - the missing price ticket! I hate this in a shop and I found it in shop after shop - all major retailers.

Out of town retail parks can often encapsulate the best and the worst of retail in one place. The parking is usually horrendous and battles for parking spaces take place regularly. If you've ever worked in one of these "out-of-towners" and had to regularly leave your car there, you'll know the state that they can end up in with bumps and scrapes. Because of the tendency to operate late hours, there are usually operating on skeleton staffing. And there are sometimes the parking enforcement cowboys that want to take money from you if you stay there too long - isn't the point that you stay there and shop?

But yesterday was missing price ticket day. The first place I saw it was an outlet shop for a major international sorts wear brand. There were signs everywhere showing things like-

"50% off lowest marked price"

"Save 25% on ticket price"

"Further reductions"

And time and time again there were no tickets on the products. Whole racks of clothing with 100 items and I looked through half of them and found not a single price label. It wasn't just me that noticed it. I walked past four other shoppers they were complaining about missing prices.

Next stop was a national supermarket chain that had a big display of consumer electronics as soon as you walk through the doors. Around 20 items in total and 5 of them were missing prices. For a display of this nature, price is a major purchase factor. The price of this is sensitive and all the big players watch each other's price movements with great care. So to have a display missing approximately a quarter of it's prices will cause customers to just walk away.

And this is the point. Away from small shops where you are never more than a metre or two away from your customers, pricing is essential. The result of missing prices is either grumbling customers or customers that walk away. And neither is a reaction that a retailer wants to create in customers.

I'm sure that most of my readers will look at this and think "well this doesn't happen in my store." But if this can happen in major retailers in the examples I saw yesterday then it can slip through the net of others. Go out to your store today and check price labels - make sure that you are ready to trade in every way.

Don't cause your customers to grumble or walk away when the solution is so simple.

Not everything can be bought on the High Street-