Let’s Lighten Up Black Friday
Black Friday—which earned its name because that is the date on the calendar that moves many retailers’ balance sheets from red to black—has come to take on a darker meaning to the folks in one Long Island, New York village.
As you may have heard, this past Friday, a security guard at a Long Island Walmart was trampled to death by as many as 1,000 “early bird shoppers” hoping to be one of the few to score a cut-rate TV, gaming console or talking Elmo. As tragic as it is that no customers stopped to help the doomed man (or the injured pregnant woman who was also knocked down), one has to wonder whether Walmart store management, corporate management, or even the retail industry as a whole deserves a share of the blame.
We talk often about how marketers train their customers to behave. Major retailers have created the monster of the 4 a.m. “door-buster sale” on the Friday after Thanksgiving. To entice shoppers, they drop the price of a selection of high-demand products, offering staggering savings, BUT (yes, there’s always a “but”) with the understanding that supplies of those $499 40” TVs or the $10 DVD players is limited to one or two per store. So for those of you not quick enough to get to the electronics aisle before everyone else, tough luck. You would have done better sleeping off the tryptophan.
Suddenly you understand the mindset of those early-hour shoppers. They were “trained” in a sense to exhibit this “every man (or woman) for himself” behavior. Mad dashes down the aisles without concern for employees and other shoppers are not only condoned, they are in a sense rewarded. Little old ladies are just speed bumps. Christmas shopping suddenly resembles festival seating at a Who concert.
The sad thing is, even if retailers were to agree that the whole notion of Black Friday has gotten out of control, there’s not much they can do about it. Die-hard customers have been trained to scour ad circulars on Thanksgiving Day and come up with an hour-by-hour battle plan for Friday morning. And if, as a retailer, you opt out of this game, your potential customers will just move on to some other retailer that’s in.
My hope is that retailers will recognize that customer experience is the most important thing to focus on. Providing blockbuster pricing is part of the experience, but can it be done in a way that treats all customers fairly and provides a safe and sane shopping experience that will generate “good stories” afterwards? How about a free gift card to everyone in line at 6 a.m. to be spent in the store as they please, with no urgency to be the first one to the electronics aisle? Or letting them order special merchandise for limited hours that morning on their PDAs or laptops?
Posted by Mickey
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