Sunday, November 26, 2006

Two different ways to see Black Friday

I was surprised to read this headline in the Washington Post, Fewer Shoppers Hit the Malls for Black Friday. The article states:

The National Retail Federation estimated that 140 million people hit the stores and shopped online during the past four days, down about 5 million from last year. Black Friday, the symbolic kickoff of the holiday season for retailers, drew about 58.9 million people, down more than 1 million.

Yet, our local Toledo Blade headline states, Customers pack stores in search of bargains:

About 137 million Americans planned to shop this weekend, with some looking for large-screen high-definition televisions on sale for under $1,000. The National Retail Federation trade group estimates people will spend, on average, $791 this season.

If the National Retail Federation estimated 137 million people were going to shop and then estimated that 140 million did shop...you'd think that would be good news.

:-)

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Why should we, as consumers, reward the Bull Shite marketing machines that attempt to tell us we're missing something if we don't throw our hard earned dollars in their coffers when they over-work their under-paid employees and waste profits on over-saturating all media outlets with "seasonal advertising" for crap we don't need in the first place?

Dave Dragon
http://davedragon.blogspot.com

Unknown said...

Dave, we shouldn't, this was more about pointing out that the same numbers were being used to demonstrate "good" news and "bad" news. I'm not an advocate of buying things just for the sake of buying them but there are large numbers of our society that are over consumers.

I do celebrate Christmas, however in our family it's less about the number of gifts and more on what the reason behind what it's supposed to be about.

Hooda Thunkit (Dave Zawodny) said...

Well the greedy retailers began cutting prices earlier than ever signaling that their merchandise is definitely overpriced, which we knew all along.

And with WalMart's disappointing Black Friday totals, they are now in a real fix; the only way to recover from the bad start is to cut prices even more.

Heheheheh :-)

Consumers can also play with numbers...