The Three Myths Of Black Friday

By Thomas Lee, San Francisco Chronicle: Business
Wed, 11/26/2014 - 4:40pm

Black Friday is the most important shopping day of the year, a time when retailers use strategic discounts to jump-start a season that accounts for most of the year’s sales and profit. Images of people breaking down doors and loading up shopping carts must mean retailers are printing money, right? Black Friday and the rest of the holiday shopping season have become profit sinkholes — a period when retailers increasingly cut prices in a desperate attempt to preserve market share and relevance. In the age of 24/7 e-commerce, it seems weird to cling to the concept of a Black Friday or a Cyber Monday when there are holiday deals every day from Halloween to Christmas. “Instead of just a couple of days, retailers are spreading the sales out instead of forcing shoppers into a constrained time frame,” Spieckerman said. Consider these Black Friday deals: a $119 40-inch LED television from Amazon, a $224 Apple iPad Mini 2 at Best Buy, a $280 Dell Inspiron laptop at Office Depot. With such bargain-bin prices, retailers are actually losing money in the hope that shoppers will buy other merchandise at full price to more than offset the loss. Last year, the world’s largest consumer electronics retailer had high hopes for the holiday shopping season. Television sales showed signs of life. [...] PlayStation and Microsoft both released new video game consoles. Despite its best efforts, Best Buy said sales at stores open for at least a year fell 0.9 percent during the fourth quarter of 2013 amid declining profit margins. In December 2012, Target even tried to roll out its signature exclusive design collections, a partnership with luxury retailer Neiman Marcus. Since the Great Recession of 2008, consumers have cut back on discretionary items, the stuff that they can live without — electronics, designer clothing, toys. On Dec.

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