That Traditional “Screen” That Everyone Watches On Thanksgiving Day Is Not So “Traditional” Any More. American Football Gives Way To Surfing The Internet For Shopping On Black Friday

The Friday after Thanksgiving in the US is considered the start of the Christmas season. It’s make or break time for retailers who may well earn some 30% of their annual revenues from the one month of shopping through to Christmas. To say that the competition to get people into stores on that Friday – known to retailers as Black Friday -- is ferocious doesn’t begin to do that deed justice.

Tradition also calls for local television stations to park satellite units at the largest malls across America with reporters interviewing live many store managers gushing about how many people have shown up and, by the way, “Come on Down”! The spin is unbelievable. It’s not really until the next week when the credit card companies and the large stores report revenue comparisons with the previous Black Friday that one really knows whether people are spending or keeping their hands in their pockets and just looking.

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And the general public has become street-smart to all of this. They listen to those comparisons. If they hear the spend number is up then they know there won’t be so many discounts later in the shopping month so might as well shop early and get it over. But if those shopping numbers are down, then the public waits for those new newspaper ads telling them of all the major markdowns the stores are making as they panic that they will have lots of stock left on their hands.

Thanksgiving week is usually a great week for American newspapers. Their Thanksgiving editions are full of inserts from department stores, electronic stores and the like listing great loss-leader prices – in some cases almost giveaway prices – to get people up bright and early into stores.

Many electronic stores, for instance, open their doors at 6 a.m. on the Friday and people are camped outside in the parking lot for up to 24 hours before to be first in line for the $300 PC or the $100 electronic camera. As an example, this writer’s son did that last year in Florida, got in line at 2 a.m. and found himself halfway around the block. The store sent staff out to the line around 4 a.m. and starting at the front asked them what items they wanted and gave them certificates for those items so there wouldn’t be a mad rush at opening time with people getting seriously hurt. By the time they got to my son and he told them he wanted the PC and camera they told him that even though they started with about 50 of each, they were long gone.

(And as an indication of what could happen if these things aren’t managed properly, there was a stampede at a Florida mall last week when the mall opened and crowds that had not been allowed to campout in the parking lot raced to get their hands on the 16 SONY Playstation 3 consoles available in the mall on its release date. Many people got hurt).

This Thanksgiving has taken a distinct Internet turn. The last thing retailers want is for their competition to know ahead of time what loss leaders they are using to get people shopping. And yet last week on various web sites copies of those Thanksgiving circulars started showing up. Where they came from no one really knows – perhaps leaked from the people who printed the inserts, perhaps from a newspaper, or an advertising agency, who knows, but the damage was done.

The retailers went crazy and some started threatening lawsuits and some got their inserts removed, but others didn’t. And then there was Wal-Mart, the world’s largest retailer. It just couldn’t be happier.

Wal-Mart has a policy of matching all advertised specials. Go into a Wal-Mart on any Sunday, for instance, and the entrance wall is lined with the insert ads from competitors and below those ads Wal-Mart places those same products at the same price. So giving Wal-Mart the advantage of knowing several days ahead of time what specials the others would have was a disaster for the competition.

To get over that fiasco, many stores have announced they are placing specials on the Internet for Thanksgiving Day only (web sale only) or for Thanksgiving and Black Friday (web and in-store) . And those web sites are gong to be loaded on Thanksgiving Day – again that shows a new retail work mentality for if there is one day in the year when everything is really closed down it is Thanksgiving!

But for the retailer Thanksgiving is really the best day in the year for letting the web show entire families what’s on offer. The tradition in many households is to watch American football games all day and at some time in the afternoon fit in a great turkey banquet. The Internet means that tradition changes somewhat – people are still looking at a screen but instead of football on television in many cases it’s going to be shopping research on the Internet.

And the electronics stores have been reporting for some time now that more and more shoppers are coming into their stores knowing exactly what they want, at the price they are going to pay, and have with them a printout from the web site giving all the details of the product and its price. That corresponds with a new study by Advertising.com that says 60% of shoppers now do their research online but like to walk into a store to make the purchase rather than buy online, too.

Retailers have finally figured out that their advertising business is multi-functional, too. Since people like to do research online, but buy offline, they have now figured out their own web sites should act as that catalyst to get people to visit the store.

So if Black Friday was not enough, many retailers now refer to the following Monday as Cyber Monday. Retailers like Hewlett-Packard and Nordstrom Department Stores are buying out many popular, but not too expensive, sites on Monday to launch their digital campaigns for the season. The expression “multi-channel retailers” is now making the rounds.

And here is FTM’s Thanksgiving present to you. Many years ago one of the most successful sitcom shows on US television was WKRP in Cincinnati – a show that ran several years about the running of a local US radio station. That station decided to do a Thanksgiving promotion by sending a helicopter high over a shopping mall and sending out live turkeys to the shoppers below. What’s that, you say turkeys can’t fly? Click here to enjoy the station’s play-by-play coverage of yet another promotion that didn’t go quite as planned.