Five minutes after midnight today, moments into the earliest store opening on the first shopping day of the season, the beleaguered employees at CompUSA on 57th Street in Manhattan laid down some ground rules: no more pushing, no more grabbing, and no more stealing other customers' $9.99 wireless PC cards.What about biting and eye-gouging?
Across the country, millions of Americans mobbed discount stores, raced into suburban malls and swarmed downtown shopping districts in a retail ritual whose outlandishness - and sleeplessness - seems to grow with every season.So if you don't have a riot on the premises in the cold dark of the Friday morning after Thanksgiving, people are going to ignore you for the rest of their Christmas shopping? I sure don't want to meet the folks in the focus groups that rendered that conclusion. They must have been a rough bunch!
Merchants, fearful that shoppers might be scared off by higher fuel costs, opened even earlier than last year - by an hour (Wal-Mart), six hours (CompUSA), and in one case, even a day (Kmart).
Retailers are putting a greater emphasis on the day after Thanksgiving because they find it strongly influences decisions about where to shop for the rest of the holiday season. Deep discounts, in particular, they say, create the impression that a retailer is offering better values than competitors. "If we don't have the right door busters we don't have a good Christmas," said Ron Gregory, district manager for Sears in Chicago.
Anyhow, Black Friday is over and now it's time for Cyber Monday:
"Cyber Monday," the term coined for the Monday after Thanksgiving, comes on the heels of the busy "Black Friday" shopping day when many brick-and-mortar retailers begin turning a profit.OK, but why Monday?
The good news for online shoppers this year, is that "Cyber Monday" is becoming the Web shopping equivalent to "Black Friday" when retailers launch major sales and discounts to drive traffic, analysts said.
"Most people who shop online do it at work, not at home," despite rising rates of high-speed home Internet connections, said Jay McIntosh, Americas director of retail and consumer products at Ernst & Young. Work connections tend to be faster than those at home, he said.And Monday is their first day back "at work." Well, at least you won't get stepped on - unless the boss catches you.
