The effect of the poor U.S. economy on Black Friday and the holiday shopping season

Wednesday, December 3, 2008



The day after Thanksgiving, called Black Friday in the retail industry, signifies the start of the holiday shopping season, and is usually one of the busiest shopping days of the year. Steep discounts and door-buster deals mean consumers flock to stores to start their holiday shopping and spend, spend, spend.

Black Friday is named for retailer’s profits. It’s the day when, traditionally, retailer’s books go from red, meaning a deficit, to black, meaning profit.

Ra-Lin Discount owner Allan Poushter said this year, Black Friday didn’t put the store’s accounting books in the black, but he said it made them much closer to being profitable.

With the failing U.S. economy, predictions for Black Friday profits nationwide were grim. Financial analysts thought fewer consumers would shop and those who did would spend less money than in years previous. Nationwide, this year's Black Friday was not as profitable as it has been in the past.

Poushter said that wasn’t the case for Ra-Lin.

“This was our best Black Friday ever,” Poushter said. “Definitely better than last year.”

Poushter said this year’s sales were ten to 20 percent better than last year’s for Black Friday, and Ra-Lin employee Keith Mann said the advertisements for steeply discounted electronics drew a record number of shoppers for the day.

"They were lined up to get into the television department,” Mann said. “It's a pretty big department, and pretty ample space back there. But they were lined up around the jewelry counter, coming down the aisle, to get into the television department."

Black Friday’s success aside, the economic recession is expected to mean less profit for the rest of the shopping season.

But, Poushter remains optimistic, predicting this season’s profits to be the same if not better than last year’s. Poushter said the national economy does not affect his central New York business.

“I think most people in Upstate New York still have their jobs,” Poushter said. “Also, there was none of these funny mortgages going on up around here. The prices never went up that high for us to come back down, so we have a little more stable economy here.”

Poushter said the analysts who predicted poor Black Friday sales performances and even poorer holiday shopping season profits did so with states like California and Florida in mind—states he said are the reason for the bad U.S. economy statistics.

Poushter said with the economy in Syracuse which he said he believes to be stable remaining unaffected by the national statistics, holiday shopping at Ra-Lin should also remain stable.

However, with fewer shopping days this season because of the late date of Thanksgiving, Poushter admits each day’s sales count more for making this season profitable than in the past.
Mann said he notices the effect the economy is having on daily business.

“Look at it here today,” Mann said. “It’s slow here today.”

But Poushter said Ra-Lin’s customers are last minute shoppers, waiting for further slashing of prices in the days leading up to Christmas. Poushter said he is confident that sales on those days will make up for lost sales on slow days.

Poushter admits that the economy has had some negative affect on his business before the holiday shopping season, and will probably negatively influence profits in the coming year. But he said he is confident that this holiday shopping season will be one of the store’s best ever.

Keith Mann discusses his feelings about the Wal-Mart trampling this Black Friday as a retail industry employee:

About this package (sorry about the novel):
Throughout this semester, I have been working to improve my performance in live situations. I took this opportunity to do a look-live donut on this story to get more practice being live in the field. I did the look-live portion with the intention that it should look like I was doing a live donut for the 11:00 news because that is how my schedule worked out when putting the package together.

In some ways, the live donut worked for this story. One thing I really liked is that I said which neighborhood Ra-Lin is in. I know it is a very small detail, but I like it, in part because I am proud that I was actually able to figure it out, and in part because I think that small detail really drove home the point that this was a local perspective specific to my Syracuse audience. Also, I think my performance was smooth and professional, and I like my physical appearance. For the most part, I don’t look too rattled by my mistakes, which is a pretty big improvement over my past performances.

However, I think I adopted an inappropriate demeanor for this live shot--in class, Professor Nicholson pointed out that it looked like someone in my family had died--and I’m not sure the set-up worked as well, in retrospect, as I thought it did in the field. One key element of the story that is important to understand when looking at the donut is that a dozen cars were ticketed for illegal parking because the lot was full, and the owners of Ra-Lin were planning to pay for all the tickets.

I guess I thought an anchor intro could explain that part of the story, but, in retrospect, that’s not really what my story is about. The anchor intro should be what is new. In this case, the anchor intro should have been new figures about the failing economy and new predictions about bad sales figures for this holiday shopping season. The full parking lot anecdote and lead-in to my story did not really work.

I really needed customer reactions to make this a solid story. I intended the story to be about whether people were going to spend as much money as last year in this current recession. I ended up having a story about what a store owner thinks people will do based on what they did Black Friday. Without the customer reaction, the story is really one sided, and not entirely credible. I’m sure that Poushter does believe Ra-Lin will do well this holiday shopping season, but I have no way to verify his statements about sales figures that he used to back up his assertions. Customer reactions don’t need me to be quite as incredulous when using them in a story.

Unfortunately, the customers while I was at the store were very uncomfortable with my even being there. No one agreed to be interviewed. With the extended deadline, I planned to return the next day when different customers were there, get customer reactions, finish putting my story together, and do a live donut based on my finished story. However, because of the way my schedule worked out (it took me a lot longer than I had anticipated finishing an exam for one of my classes) I did not get back to the store the next day until after it had closed. I therefore had no customer reactions and had to go with the incomplete story I got the previous day.

After not being able to get any customer reactions at Ra-Lin, I had thought about going to any other business (maybe the parking lot at the mall) and getting reactions from any consumer about what the economy meant for their holiday shopping. At the time, I decided against doing that because the story I had was very specific to Ra-Lin. But, in retrospect, I should have done that and reworked my story, because any consumer reaction is better than no reaction at all.

Because of the extended deadline for this project, I was able to really pay attention to detail in putting together b-roll. For past stories, I have neglected sequencing in favor of getting a story done by deadline. With this story, I was able to choose and arrange clips in a way that made my story visually interesting, even without an audio track. I notice there are some jump cuts and some of the timing seems a little off for parts of the piece, but overall I like that I was able to get back to basics and put together meaningful video in addition to the audio aspect for this package.

For this story, I took the opportunity to try a longer format piece. I am often very frustrated by how time constraints really limit the amount and quality of information I put in a story. I know that with practice I will get good enough to figure out how to put together a quality story regardless of how short it is, but for now, I wanted to see what would happen with a longer story. Turns out, it’s pretty much the same. I still feel like there is more that I would like to have said.

I think Parkinson's Law applies to some extent—the amount of work to do will expand to fill the time in which it can be done. For this package, the story expanded to fill the longer space without any astronomical improvement in quality of information. Lesson learned. I’ll just have to suck it up and practice putting together quality short-format stories.