Black’s Black Friday – 15% off full priced items
I was lying in bed this morning when Black Friday was all over the news. If this blog is the only media you ever take notice of you need to know that Black Friday is an Americun import designed to try and make people rush to spend money by thinking they are getting fantastic deals on stuff.
So I picked up my trusty phone and looked up Tesco online. Not with a view to buying anything you realise. What do I need? Just to see what kind of bargains were available. Oo, Tesco’s website was busy and I couldn’t get on it. At 7.30 in the morning. People need to get a life!
In the interest of research I went on Amazon. I could access Amazon.co.uk. That’s what happens when you own a massively scalable cloud resource. Nothing on there to buy that jumped out of the page though so I visited PC World. The “bargains” on PC World appeared to all have 10% off. Oh.
Now don’t get me wrong. 10% off is a good thing but it doesn’t really seem to be the level of discount that should justify the hype around “Black Friday”. Maybe I’m just an ungrateful sod. Maybe these products are already sold at such competitive prices that it’s difficult to knock the price down any further. No so sure about that when you consider the manufacturing costs of electronics these days must be rock bottom – just look at the components of my dissected Chromebook in yesterday’s post. PC World seems a bloated inefficient organisation to me (allegedly, own opinion etc). Never make the mistake of telling them you are buying something for your business. It takes about 15 minutes to process a credit card when 5 seconds is the norm.
I’m sure that if you shopped around online you would probably find that product you were considering clicking “buy” for available elsewhere at that Black Friday reduced price. Time spent doing due diligence for product purchases online has replaced time spent wandering around the shops. At least in my world it has. Especially when it comes to buying train tickets. Let’s not go there.
Just to round off this somewhat negative post I’d like to share with you the fact that my walk to work takes me by Blacks, the outdoors shop. Their window dressing was using “Cyber weekend” as their promo as opposed to Black Friday. Obvs trying to avoid confusion. I think they missed a trick. They could have called it “Blacks Friday” and demonstrated leadership.
Blacks’ Cyber weekend promo is a perfect example of what I’ve been talking about in this post. They are offering 15% off “full priced” items. Who buys full priced items these days? Maybe I’m just tight…
One reply on “Black Friday stuff”
As a card-carrying “Americun” I feel it is my place — nay, my responsibility! — to point out that your “Black Friday” foray was somewhat faulty, that due to the fact that you made it online. You see, Tref, “Black Friday” is an on-site “brick-and-mortar” phenomenon in the USA that sees most shops putting many items up for sale for one day at remarkably low prices with the intent of bringing customers in who will buy much more than the one or two items they hope to “save hundreds” on. Online? Well, there are certainly deals to be had and plenty of hype to go around (hello, Apple?), but for the most part the web purveyors hold off on their best deals until “Cyber Monday” (the Monday after Thanksgiving and “Black Friday”, when folks who have returned to work choose to instead spend copious time online shopping). Of course, UK businesses online likely aren’t hip or on-the-ball enough yet to hook into the rich vein that is “Cyber Monday”, but I have confidence they’ll eventually get there. 🙂