Black Friday and Cyber Monday Recap

So what did everyone think of Shopping Weekend 2009?  What did everyone get?  Here’s my take.

I participated (although lightly) in both Black Friday and Cyber Monday this year and have a few opinions on the weekend.  Black Friday wasn’t really anything special this year.  Yes, it was interesting for Amazon to drop down in price and compete with the Big Box Stores (Like Walmart) and this added a new story line to keep an eye on.  Target, Best Buy and Walmart (The Big 3 in my opinion) all offered very similar deals; none of which were very impressive.  It seemed that the deals were positioned as great deals, but nevertheless disappointed shoppers.  For the most part, the everyday prices were as impressive as the sales, and this may have confused shoppers.

None of the major stores had that sale item that made you say, “WOW, I have to go there.”  In years past, these were a regular occurrence.  Obviously the poor economy and lower inventory levels made sales harder to come by for retailers.  If they had offered those couple, “Oh my god!” prices, retailers would have done a lot better this past weekend.

The same was true for cyber monday.  There were lots of deals (free shipping was popular) but none of them really stood out to me.  Another thing to note is that this year online sales started as early as Thursday for some retailers.  This could impact Cyber Monday’s sales levels.  Although the deals were not that great today (Monday) or Friday; if consumers wanted to find a deal, because of shear volume (amount of sales) they could find something they liked.

It will be interesting to see the traffic and sales report numbers as they come out.  I predict that because of the whole weekend being full of online sales, and the lackluster deals that sales may not be as high as retailers would like.  We should know more in the days to come.

So how did I make out this weekend?  Well, a LCD HDTV, Blue Ray Movies, and Blue Ray Planet Earth made this weekend a good one for me.  Coincidentally, the TV I got wasn’t even a Black Friday special.  It was a Best Buy Holiday price.

Now excuse me when I go watch Gladiator on Blue Ray

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