From the archives-Originally posted on 11/22/07.
Black Friday used to be an awesome day, one of my favorite days of the year.
It is always within 4 days of my birthday, so the bargains of the day coincided nicely for me right off the bat.
I remember the good old days (before all the ads were available online weeks beforehand) when I would run out of my dorm first thing Thursday morning and buy the local paper. Back then stores like Best Buy actually had amazing deals.
One year I was able to get 4 $400 cell phones out the door for free after $250 off instantly and a $150 Best Buy rebate without even activating a plan!
Another time I got tons of fairly expensive electronics at CompUSA all for free after rebates.
I went religiously every year and often camped out at stores like Best Buy until 2005. (Besides for when my birthday came out on Black Friday on November 26, 2004, when I was down in S. Paulo, Brazil. I was so down about missing the deals that in a stroke of fate I decided to start a blog called ctownbochur.blogspot.com and shared it with a couple friends on AIM…maybe you’ve heard of it?)
I was always able to make enough money reselling the goodies on Ebay to feed my technology bug for the entire next year.
Last year’s Black Friday sales were lame.
This year’s offerings are worse.
I mean for 364 days out the year, no savvy shopper would ever walk into a Best Buy or CompUSA, but at least they had 1 day of good deals.
Do they think that the Black Friday hype is so great that they can still draw the same crowd while not offering any compelling offers?
Or have they simply gotten smarter and realized that selling items at a loss doesn’t make good business sense. After all the term “Black Friday” is thought to have come from the fact that this was the day when retailers would finally climb out of “the red” and into “the black” for the year, due to it being the busiest shopping day of the year.
It actually made perfect business sense. There were only a very limited number of deeply discounted items, but every store still drew thousands of customers buying other items to make up for it. Besides the best deals were always after rebates, which most people seemingly don’t even bother to apply for.
Black Friday used to be a bunch of marketing hype, but savvy shoppers could still come out ahead.
Now it is all hype, without any of the benefits.
Goodbye Black Friday. It was nice while you lasted.
