Saturday, November 24, 2012

Is Black Friday Beginning to Jump the Shark?




Hold everything!  The national obsession with shopping – which gave birth to the retail bonanza best known as Black Friday – may be in the process of victimizing itself with its own success.
Initial indications suggest that irresistible bargains are luring record numbers of U.S. shoppers into stores such as Macy’s, Best Buy and Target.  Still, a backlash is widening over the encroachment of holiday sales on Thanksgiving. 

Amidst the obligatory swell crowds that come along with Black Friday, stressed out store workers are clamoring for relief from the stress of the holiday shopping season. Accordingly, some observer are becoming more leery about the spillover effects.

Each year, the steady creep of holiday discounting threatens to transform Black Friday into Black Thursday — and in some cases even earlier than that. Some stores have begun to use the week before Thanksgiving to lay the groundwork for the big Thanksgiving rush – the most important shopping day of the year for retailers. Yet each holiday shopping season appears to see a rise in clashes between ill tempered shoppers, push back from increasingly aggravated shop workers, and new strains on retailers themselves……..

Read all about it at http://www.cnbc.com/id/49941824

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