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Black Friday is just two weeks away. In days of yore,before we were a culture obsessed with spoilers, before we thought it was okey-dokey to out people before they wanted to be outted, or share their pregnancies before they wanted to share them, or have a wink-wink mentality towards news embargos, businesses could print their advertising circulars for Black Friday without concern that the contents of those highly coveted merchandising sales sheets reached the general public.
That was then and this is now. Bloggers have been absolutely orgasmic the past few days over the release of leaked advertising circulars.
From The Consumerist
Here's how to get the most of Friday, November 24.
• Research the deals you want ahead of time. Fat Wallet is a great place to start.
• Study the leaked circulars.
• Comparison shop. Just because it's in the Black Friday ad, doesn't mean it's a good price.
• Stores will often hand out vouchers for first-in line "door busters" with the biggest savings. To snag these, you'll have to get there early, as in, camp out the night before.Bring:
• Chair
• Friends/Family - snag vouchers, hold your spot in line for bathroom breaks.
• Coat, mittens, gloves, hot cocoa thermos, hot pockets, hot tamales, whatever you need to stand outside in the cold for hours upon hours.Most importantly, don't calculate the time/hassle cost of standing in long lines and elbowing your way through competitive shoppers. You'll just get depressed.
As THE EMG writes in her postOMG- it's Coming
Now after several years we have managed to get this whole Black Friday thing-ie down to a science.. almost. However last year we added the WEAPON of this so if you too are one of those SICK SICK people who drags themselves out of the bed at 5AM the day after Thanksgiving make sure you take a peek..
The this that EMG mentions is Black Friday Ads:
BFAds.net aims to serve one purpose: to help you better your Black Friday experience. While the newspaper circulars do not usually come out until a couple days before Black Friday, the ads are usually available on the internet weeks in advance. BFAds acts as a compilation portal: scouring the web for the latest Black Friday information and organizing it all into a readily available database.
One of the more fascinating aspects of all the giddiness over the leaked ads is that very few women are blogging about them. This is definitely a male dominated topic. What's with that?
Could it be that most women know that while the retailers may have actually been taken by surprise several years ago when sites like Black Friday Ads leaked their holiday circulars, there is a strong hunch that these leaks have now been added into the marketing mix and that the products in their circulars are not that great a deal.
As Evan Shuman writes in eweek.com
But even though several retailers tried to stop those sites from disseminating the sales data early, the sites still promoted those retailers and pushed merchandise the retailer was trying to discount anyway. In other words, there is a huge question mark about whether those Black Friday sites ultimately helped major retailers a lot more than they hurt them.
The Black Friday sites last year raised a deeper question, which is whether the effort to keep Black Friday sales secret was an objective that even made sense anymore, given the Web realities.
Nevertheless , there is one company that is not playing along -Linens'N Things which sent Black Friday Ads a Cease and Desist Order:
Whom It May Concern:
You have posted on your site http://bfads.net/ confidential information and copyrighted material belonging to “Linens-n-Thingsâ€.
The confidential information consists of the name of Linens-n-Things retail products and the associated sale prices for those products that Linens-n-Things may offer to the public in a future sale. You have posted this information at http://bfads.net/store/lnt. Linens-n-Things demands that you remove this confidential information immediately and delete it from your site and any other site you may have posted this confidential information to.
There is no legal manner in which you could have obtained this confidential information. Either someone illegally disclosed it to you or you illegally conspired to obtain it.
In any event, your continued possession and disclosure of this information is illegal.
Linen 'N Things not withstanding, the majority of big box retailers don't seem to have their undies in a bundle over the "illegal" sites.
Why should they? As of this posting,when you search for Black Friday
