Accounting & Investing Info for San Antonio A & M
Black Friday is the shopping day after Thanksgiving. it is named with the idea that on this day, stores are ‘in the black.’
JCP and Kohl’s opened at 4 AM a sure sign of worry. But sales overall are apparently up 8.3%. Perhaps the credit cards are not maxxed out after all. Again, what does tis say about a store’s strategy?
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Having worked in retail the past seven years I know firsthand the importance of black Friday. Last year the company’s sales were down and our district tossed around the idea of opening at 4am but luckily they settled on 6. There are hourly calls from the DM wanting to know what your store is doing to bring in the customers. There is a lot of pressure on all levels of management if sales are down so I can see why some make the decision to open at such early hours. They want to show that they are doing everything they can to drive sales.
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As one of those 4 am shoppers, black Friday is one of my favorite days of the year. Mostly because if you look in the right places, you can find tons of amazing deals and specials. For example, both me and my sister received a free MP3 player from Old Navy at 5 am, and I won a free $50 gift card to Vista Ridge Mall at 6 am. I guess it’s just hard for me to see stores as making huge profits when their prices are dramatically lower on this day than most other days.
On another note, the money spent on black Friday in the US($10.3 billion per morningmoney.com) is more than it would take to provide clean, sanitary water to the entire world ($9 billion per global issues.com). Embarrassing, but true.
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Working in retail myself, I noticed the big traffic surge this past Black Friday. Our total one day sales were almost double of a typical weekend day. I find it pretty interesting how a retailer will advertise incredible deals but only order a handfull of quantity for such a high traffic shopping day. These few items that the store takes a loss on is enough to keep the customer lured to the store all day long. Unfortunately, you really have to be the early bird if you want to get these incredible deals, because by mid morning most of these too-good-to-be-true deals are gone and the store has the shoppers inside! This is the retail gain, i mean game:-)
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$9B would provide clean water for how long, is this the capital cost of constructing the facilities? And then someone would just operate them? Actually that sounds pretty cheap, I saw a program at Rotary two weeks ago on a project to provide clearn water to an African village.
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Two good posts from Eliz and Ambroz, yes the retail gain. I bought the Retail SPDR based on Ambroz good experience last week, let’s hope sales hold up for a few days!
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Professor Elam 
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