Real Christmas

Nothing creates a Christmas buying frenzy like hanging up the “Going Out of Business” signs. CompUSA announced this week they are closing up shop right after Christmas.

There are two ways to look at news like this:

It’s great news because bargains are bound to be had just at the most critical buying time of the year.

It’s bad news because a major purchase like a computer just won’t be supported if something goes wrong on Christmas morning and the place you bought it from isn’t open the day after.

But no matter which way a consumer looks at it most merchants like me have to breathe deeply at this news. CompUSA was once a titan in the computer industry. And they are crying victim now to Best Buy and WalMart. It’s funny to me that they don’t consider Dell and other Internet merchants as key to their downfall. But then again, if they can’t see the obvious then there is no doubt why there are out of business.

So go forth all ye merry Christmas buyers — have at it at CompUSA. But beware: you’re going to have warrantee issues, long lines and some really surly soon-to-be-unemployed sales people to deal with as the price to pay for whatever bargains you score.

They call it Black Friday for several reasons.

Traditionally, the definition of Black Friday is when retailers go from operating in the red to making a profit — or in the black — for the year. That’s an old tradition and it is a wive’s tale. Black Friday these days means anything but profit.

These days Black Friday is a dark day for retailers. General Growth Properties, a major developer of malls and shopping centers, is expanding an initiative to open their centers as early as 12:01 a.m. on Black Friday, much to the chagrin of the weary merchants who rent spaces in their malls.

To GGP, it is all about the hype of “Rockin’ Shoppin’ Eve” and hype is something retailers use to great effect. It is an outrageously long day — a full 24 hours in some markets — that taxes seasonal staffs right out the gate and bogs down inventory flow just as the season is beginning.

Christmas — and hype — are vital to ever getting into the black for the year for most retailers. A retailer these days would love to have 30 straight days of pure profit. But Christmas is more of a two-week season — and if you can’t make it within those two weeks you won’t make it at all in today’s competitive environment. So all the door-busters, the bleary-eyed sales hours and the incredible bargains aim to generate madness and hype first — for profits later.

And that, more than anything else, is what Black Friday is all about. Through smoke, mirrors, red markers and brief glimpses of bargains the name of the game for retailers on Black Friday is to just get you in the doors.

They know that if you can just get there they can plant the seeds for future sales less than 4 weeks hence. The $5 buck toaster looks great at 4am on Black Friday. But maybe you’ll see the deluxe $25 dollar model and think about it for a week or two and get it instead. As the doors open and the crowds rush in it is headgames — not sales — that retailers are really banking on.  

They don’t want you to know that the $300 laptops they have in stock are in very limited supply. They want you to see the $599 model that is just the start in a whole line of laptops they carry.

They don’t want you to know that the $29 microwave has a 30-day warrantee at best and will likely last a few days beyond that if you’re lucky.

They don’t want you to know that their employees hate being there in the dead of night. They don’t want you to know that the employees have been trained on this day to “stack it deep and sell it cheap — just get them in and get them out.” Black Friday isn’t about sales, service and the positive shopping experience. It is about the madness and making the news where the talking heads evaluate the whole season based upon the footage of the rush through the doors before dawn.

How do you maximize your Black Friday dollars?

1. Get in the stores on Wednesday before Thanksgiving. Look at what they are stacking in the aisles. Evaluate it in person and decide if it is really worth getting up in the middle of the night for it.
2. Talk to others and find out where they are going. Chances are the big name big boxes are where they are going — WalMart, Penneys, Target, etc. Consider the secondary retailers and the bargains they offer. Fabric stores, hardware stores and other typically smaller retailers have just-as-attractive bargains that you’ll have a better chance at actually getting.
3. Stay away from electronics, computers and appliances. These high-ticket, high appeal products draw the crowds and cause the biggest disappointments. If you get there early head for clothes, books, food items, furniture and other practical items. Chances are these represent better quality bargains. Electronics and especially computer items tend to be “yesterday’s technology”.  
4. Talk to the staff. Some won’t tell you how much of any particular product they have — but many will.

Walmart isn’t waiting until the day after Thanksgiving. They want it now. Walmart isn’t playing games this year with websites who break news of their ads early either. They’re telling everyone first. Walmart is take Christmas serious this year and they want you to know it.

Wal-Mart will offer black-Friday prices three weeks early when the retailer unveils secret in-store specials: extraordinary prices on five of the most sought after gifts this season. Understanding that more and more consumers are using the internet to comparison shop, Wal-Mart plans to reveal online a round of unbeatable savings on Thursday. The items will be available in stores beginning Friday morning, November 2 as the merchant officially opens special Christmas shops.

Visit Walmart’s “secret” web page by clicking here. A 50″ plasma TV for $998? Available right now. A $350 laptop? Get it now.

How smart is this?

It’s brilliant. Given Wally’s demographic breaking this ad the first weekend of the month will give their buyers plenty of incentive to spend month-end paychecks. The values are Walmart trademarks and it clearly sets them aside. Unlike JCPenneys and similar retailers who hold “door-busting” events now year round this sale screams value and it screams Christmas.

U.S. Christmas shoppers may spend more this year than last year, a Gallup Poll indicated Monday.

The poll, conducted Oct. 4-7, found U.S. shoppers plan to spend an average of $909 on Christmas gifts this season — $2 more than a similar forecast at this time last year, the Gallup Organization said.

Gallup cautioned that last year’s mid-October average estimate fell to $826 by mid-November.

If the spending estimate holds up through December it would possibly be enough to make this shopping season better than average, Gallup said. And if spending drops between now and November by as much as it did in 2006, the figure would still be at the upper end of the range seen in recent years, Gallup said.

Some 35 percent of adults nationwide said they would spend $1,000 or more on gifts, Gallup said. Twenty-seven percent said they would spend $500 to $999. Thirty percent planned to spend less than $500.

Eight percent offered no estimate, including some who said they did not celebrate Christmas.

The telephone poll of 1,010 national adults, age 18 and older, had a maximum margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points, so differences of less than that amount are statistically insignificant.

Here they go again. The British media is all a ga-ga about Christmas trees — upside down Christmas trees. This trend started in earnest two years ago when trendy trees colored with black feathers first hit the media. They were supposed to be all the rage. But at more than $500 per tree the trend never really caught fire.

So now the media there has taken it in another direction — the upside-down tree.

For the space saving novelty that an upside-down tree is the UK media is taking it a bit far, however, by touting these trees as old-time traditional. They quote promoters of the trees as saying that the upside-down tree is tradition and rich in religious symbolism.

A spokesman for the company said: “The ‘upside down tree’ is not so new!

“Hanging fir trees upside down dates back to the Middle Ages.”

“Legend has it that a 7th century monk used the triangular shape of the fir tree to describe the Holy Trinity to the German people.

“It then became revered as ‘God’s tree’ and was hung upside down from the ceiling as a symbol of Christianity.

Er….right. Try and find any kind of historian to back you up on that one.

The recent lead paint recalls have many of us on edge. Now it seems the stuff is in Christmas lights. We talked to one woman who found the warning. She plans to throw them away, but she may have a hard time finding a replacement.

We found the same lead warning on every box of Christmas lights we picked up at Lynchburg’s Wal-Mart and K-Mart. It reads, “Handling the coated electrical wires of this product exposes you to lead.”

Lesia Grubbs found this at the Wal-Mart Supercenter in Altavista. Something she doesn’t want to have near her two-year-old daughter.

Lesia Grubbs, Concerned Parent - “And when I picked the lights up and I looked at the back to make sure they were alright to use for it, that’s when I seen it about the lead.”

Dr. Katherine Nichols says there’s no need to panic, but if you do handle the lights containing lead, be sure to wash your hands thoroughly.

Dr. Katherine Nichols, Central VA Health District Director - “If you had it on your hands and while your decorating the tree, you’re eating Christmas cookies, you could ingest some lead that way.”

Dr. Nichols says you should not let children under five near them, just to be safe. You could find the warning on other cords covered with PVC plastic or the insulation around electrical wires.

Sears Christmas Wishbook was part of the Christmases of my childhood. Every autumn the Wishbook would come out and with it came my dreams of Christmas. I literally once had a dream where I won a Sears contest that gave the winner one item from every page in the Wishbook. I dreamt that I had to go page to page to find a whole truckload of items of that would be delivered to my house.

Sears killed their Wishbook — and seemingly, my childhood — more than 14 years ago. At that time catalogues in general were in demise. The truth of it was really that Sears was in demise and as a company it has fought for retail relevance ever since.  

The 100+ year old company now turns to the nostalgia of the Wishbook in hopes that it can spur sales in it’s old and tired format. But something tells they’re going to mess it up. After all, this is the company who merged with Kmart to improve their image and market share.

The Wishbook was a popular Christmas tradition for one reason: it felt like Christmas. When we would go to Sears to get one — or, going way back — would simply get one in the mail we never actually thought of buying anything. That wasn’t what it was all about. That is probably why they deep sixed it in the first place. The Wishbook was just that — a book for wishing.

Now Sears is the one doing the wishing and I have my doubts.

The 2007 Sears Wish Book Catalog is already available, but the retailer will unveil a “larger than life” version of the 188-page catalog in Times Square in mid-November, hosted by Ty Pennington, host of ABC’s “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition” and a Sears spokesman.

That’s sounds anything but Christmasy. In those days of my childhood we didn’t have Monte Hall hawking the Wishbook. We just had the Wishbook and it generated magic all on its own.

Those days are gone. And, sadly, so too is the traditional Wishbook — no matter how hard Sears tries to bring it back.