via Yahoo! Finance
Virginia resident Sue Van Glanden is so committed to shopping on Black Friday that she’s celebrating Thanksgiving a day early this year.
“We’re having Thanksgiving on Wednesday, so I’ll have the whole day Thursday to rest up, get online to do research and check Twitter,” Van Glanden says, adding that she plans to hit three or four major department stores before 9 a.m. Friday. “I am a seasoned comparison shopper, so I’ll only go after the very best deals for what I was planning to buy this season.”
Van Glanden isn’t alone in her quest for bargains. The National Retail Federation estimates that Black Friday bargains will entice approximately 138 million consumers to hit stores during the 2010 Thanksgiving holiday weekend, an increase of 4 million people over last year.
Millions of Americans will brave long lines, overcrowded stores and early morning winter weather in the hopes of scoring the best deals this season. But is the added effort actually worth it?
According to experts, not really.
“Black Friday is a promotion and retailers rally around it,” Regina Lewis, who works as a consumer adviser for AOL, says, adding that you don’t need to shop on Black Friday to get the best deals.
Lewis says the competitive climate in which retailers have operated during the past few years has forced them to offer deep discounts throughout the holiday season, most notably on the Saturday before Christmas or on Cyber Monday, the newly minted online shopping day of the year.
And according to Brad Wilson, founder of the popular deals websites Bradsdeals.com and BlackFriday2010.com, even when retailers offer top bargains the day after Thanksgiving, the chances of actually scoring them are slim to none.
“You’re really looking at a short window opportunity, from about 4 a.m., when the stores first open, until 12 p.m. to get the best deals,” Wilson says. After that, stores typically sell all the discounted items and their advertised prices go back up. The idea, Wilson says, is for consumers who missed out on door-buster sales to spend on items that weren’t on their wish lists.
About 95% of all the deals you find in stores are being offered online,” Wilson says, citing Best Buy’s plan to honor all of its stores’ Black Friday prices on its website. Last year, Bath and Body Works, New York and Co. and Leapfrog.com actually offered their deepest discounts online.
And, experts say, even when retailers have better offers waiting inside their brick-and-mortar stores, the savings don’t usually justify the early morning retail run.
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Article courtesy Yahoo! Finance
