How about some Black Friday horror stories?

[vloglady]

I work in a public library, so I couldn't go out shopping. Went out Black Saturday instead. Not too much, bought my digital camera online, $96 for a HP 6.2 megapixel. not bad. My SO bought a down comforter at Macy's, $32, king size.

How about some other stories? I hear the Circuit City near me had 400 people there at opening time.

Susan

[Despina83]

I'm a cashier, and I worked on black Friday from 6:00 Am to like 2:15 and I didn't have any problems with any of my customers. Many of them were actually quite cheerful. Astounding.

[Lady Heather]

It didn't suck...

The only bad thing about Black Friday was we didn't meet our sales goals. How can a store not make sales goal on Black Friday? I had no SC's either. A very weird Black Friday.

[Sylvia727]

The only bad thing about Black Friday was we didn't meet our sales goals. How can a store not make sales goal on Black Friday? I had no SC's either. A very weird Black Friday.

I suppose it depends on how high your goals are. At my sister's store the goal is "higher than last year". They do that day by day and average how much over they were at the end of the week. More over=more bonuses. It's not a complicated system, but it does mean they have to work harder each year.

[Captain Kidd]

Friend of mine works at a Best Buy, he says Black Friday was pretty tame this year.

[Lady Heather]

X-Mas sales are suposed to be down this year, because of Gas prices and a recession. Our store works on a "better than last year" sales plan. We're behind for the first time this year, just when X-Mas sales are supposed to go up.

[Bagga]

From the sound of it, with gas prices etc, you should all brace yourself for a "Blacker than black Friday" - The 21st December. Here in my city in the UK, the shopping streets are no more crowded than usual. I think everyone is waiting waiting waiting, hoping that things will get better - so the weekend before Christmas Day is going to be awful, and the Monday that is Christmas Eve is gonna be an absolute nightmare.

Hordes of people all complaining that you have sold out of everything, which will be true, because no one has bought much during the whole of December, and the shops don't have the physical space to store all the stock needed to cope with 4 weeks worth of shopping in a 4 day period.

But we do have loads of Wiis in Hull. However, it looks like the adolescent gift of choice is going to be the DS Lite.

[Irving Patrick Freleigh]

We beat our Black Friday goal by $25,000.

Otherwise we've generally been falling a bit short of our sales goals, except for days with big sales.

Today is Senior Day. People 55 and older get 15% off their entire purchases. Sales plan is about $80,000; store manager thinks we'll do $102,000 in sales.

I think the key learning here is people are waiting for deals.

[Boozy]

I suppose it depends on how high your goals are. At my sister's store the goal is "higher than last year".

Our sales targets are always exactly 5% higher than last year.

2006 was a freak year during which we trounced our targets by about 15% - because of 2 new product launches. Which means that doing 5% more than that this year is virtually impossible, as we have ZERO new product launches.

We are unsurprisingly experiencing a market correction in 2007, a term that head office has apparently never heard.

[Retail Associate]

Black Friday at my store was very slow. I was told that by 6:00AM most of the deal seekers were gone and they began to let cashiers go home early. By the time I got in at 2:30 it was dead in there.

Thanksgiving day was actually the busiest. I went in at 8:00AM that day and we were quite busy until 12:30 or so. But it was still very tame compared to other years.

As a matter of fact, that entire weekend was the slowest I've seen that store ever (my 9th Christmas there) on a Thanksgiving/Black Friday weekend. It's rather frightening because this is when we usually get some overtime before the big cut in hours come Dec 26th.

.

[Pezzle]

We did about 2.5 mil in revenue on thanksgiving weekend (Friday and Saturday mostly). -golf clap- our store's big and in the middle of 'Jersey. I think 1.5 of it was from Black Friday, our department was number 1 in the entire company.

-asspat-

[Tolly]

Ah, Black Friday. Otherwise known (here in Tasmania at least) as Retail Hell. I feel so sorry for my sister, she works in the trendiest clothing store in the city, and it was apparently filled with teeny-boppers and perves the whole weekend. She was about ready to kill someone Sunday night, even if they did do cracking business.

And normally she's the sane one in this family.

[Ghostlightkeeper]

I don' t know about anybody else, but I thought the Black Friday sales this year were pretty lame. Usually there's something in there that makes me consider getting up way too early and standing in line. (Not that I really would but I'd consider it.) This year there was nothing of interest on sale at all.

There just didn't seem to be much in the way of really amazing deals. I expect it's because profits are down across the board and nobody wants to cut too deep into their prices. *Shrug*

[aurelemsrealm]

I have no Black Friday stories of my own. It was business as usual for me.

My wife is working a second job over the holidays as a Salvation Army Kettle Coordinator. She helps shuttle the bell ringers who have no transportation at the end of their shifts, and collects the kettles at the end of the evenings.

One of the bell ringers had to give a statement to police about a fight over a parking space at one of the local Wal-Marts. Apparently, a car and truck tried to pull into the same parking space, but the car managed to squeeze in first. The driver of the truck had a fit of road rage, and tried to ram the car out of the space until police arrived on the scene.