Black Friday and Cyber Monday - sales boost or sales hype?

In retail, we've traditionally not seen an increase in trade - even in city locations. 

There seems to be a lot of people heading out as of an evening, but shopping seems, again to be the last thing on their minds.

Zip forwards to Christmas eve, and it's chaos in the stores.

I've been racking my brain on how to jump onto the bandwagon I keep hearing about with increases of trade. Perhaps the way forwards is to have my own pub.... That would be a bad idea for many reasons!

Was just reading about Black Friday on the News ....

Couple of facts not mentioned above -

It all started as the biggest shopping day in 2001 (in USA)

Four people have died and 56 injured in Black Friday incidents since 2006

One more .....

£36bn was spent in the USA in 2012 on Black Friday 

Some odd reports on the Beeb about UK people getting arrested in Black Friday shopping mania, and Police getting called to supermarkets across the UK 

Really??? Must be the odd city folk. All quiet on the Western Front in our local Morrisons this morning when I grabbed a sarnie and some milk

Mind you, trying to access our online banking this morning via Natwest was painful, so obviously some serious transactions going through.

Anyone inundated with sales? If so what are you doing on the forum, get some work done!

For me it's a huge con, in fact i think big sales in general are a con.

There is no way whatsoever that these multi-million pound Companies reduce prices by 70% and don't still make a huge margin- it means they are overcharging in the first place.

Little 'ol me on my little 'ol Shopping Centre Stall...i go in as low as i can in the first place with my prices.

Yours Sincerely Kempres, the old-fashioned honest retailer

As I'm in a festive mood, I've got some state of the art all singing all dancing, super green, high efficiency cheap boilers both electric and gas currently on sale from only £10!!! You do however need to have them installed by us, which is going to cost you £2750.00..... Bargain.....

What gets me is people in this country expect to buy goods and materials for next to nothing and then moan that employers are only paying their workforce a minimum wage.....

Well it looks like the UK has embraced/descended into Black Friday chaos looking at the news Friday night. 

Great way for retailers to dump end of lines and lingering stock  Missus decided to go to Bicester Village retail park on Friday night, unaware of Black Friday. Was greeted with chaos and said it was like a plague of locusts had torn through the place.

Shops like Timberland were putting up different offers every hour, with queues of people waiting to get in.

She left at 10.00pm with people still queuing to get into the car park and police towing away illegally parked cars. No doubt this will be a new trend and it will get worse year on year.

So cyber Monday today, which no doubt is an excuse to stretch the Black Friday discounts over the weekend and include Monday.

Does this mean no more Boxing day madness? 

Meanwhile... In Wales....

I seriously believe this phenomena is retained within the big brands. Ok, we're specialist... it totally doesn't apply to us... but, our friends in business just had a regular day (None of them own the big stores)..

Biggest retail day was the turning of the Christmas lights for them...

Christmas eve is equally a mad day. Ill be selling stocking fillers from the boot of my car outside Tescos. (Not really, Bandages make for a pants Christmas)

Have been watching a certain television shopping channel over the weekend, they kept going on about this Black Friday nonsense as a sales gimmick, yet still selling viewers the same products at the same price as they do all year round, popped into B&Q nothing too exciting going on in there just your normal Sunday crowd looking at laminate flooring, went to Pets at Home, nothing, went to my local shop and they have no idea what a 'sale' is apart from the sandwiches which have past their sale by date by at least a week. Not much cop in the likes of DFS having a Black Friday sale as they constantly have a so called sale or rather a manipulation of the prices to sucker people in to parting with their cash.... Think it was more of a Northern thing really

Makes sense Barney.

I did enjoy watching people fight over TV's.... whilst watching my own TV...

Makes me wonder what it would be like if there were only 3 cans of beans left on the shelf, with no restock till next year....