Black Friday Trends: Using Previous Year's Sales to Plan Ahead

With a tight economy squeezing the wallets of mainstream America, holiday shopping is oftentimes a stress, as we seek to provide great gifts on a shoestring.

Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, is often one of the biggest opportunities to make those dollars stretch, as doorbuster deals are offered at super savings, drawing crowds into the brick and mortar venues, and getting the savvy online shopper out of bed in the wee hours to catch that great deal online.

For those who are diehard Black Friday shoppers, this is a day which is all about tradition, while for others, it is strictly about the savings. For the one, they wouldn't miss the hustle, the bustle, and the crowds, while for the other, they will only make the outing if the deals are right. Otherwise, they will remain at home and enjoy some extra sleep.

 If you are a diehard black friday shopper, you know where you are planning to be, what you are planning to buy, and your priorities were probably determined before the first deal site opened it's Black Friday forum for the year.  You've tucked away savings, or gift cards, and now, it's time to do a little refining, but your game plan is not hard to adjust.  You know the trends because you've been in the trenches, year after year. 

You contribute to the forums online, helping newbies to get their gameplans together, with helpful hints as to where to camp, how far ahead to do so, and how to plan for crowds and customer service problems.  You may have several years' worth of BF adscans saved to your computer, knowing how to easily access the last several years' information at a moment's notice.

 Black Friday trends, for you, are a matter of compiling your knowledge and experience with this year's needs, and synthesizing your information in order to determine this year's gameplan. 

 Whether you are new to Black Friday shopping, or have a couple of years' shopping on the day after Thanksgiving under your belt, you can benefit significantly from becoming an active reader of a deal forum.  Some coupon and deal sites devote a great deal of time and interest to Black Friday, and so perusing a few will give you a feel for the sites that best suit your style of searching and reading online. 

 Start by reading the current year's discussions, especially those that pertain to your interests.  Parents are particularly interested in toy deals, and so it's good to find threads that pertain to hot toys of the year, gaming systems, and other gifting issues.  Some folks are particularly interested in certain tech gifts, whether it be a laptop or a camera, or a particular type of television.  While much of the shopping world goes "ga-ga" over the cheapie laptop, these forum discussions may have hints at how to find the deals online before Black Friday, or comparisons with regard to money, verses quality, on various computer deals.  With the advent of the Netbook, many Black Friday forums dedicate threads and posts to the speculation of a cheap, quality Netbook as a doorbuster on Black Friday.

 Once you've familiarized yourself with a couple of deal sites and forums, and familiarized yourself with some of the current trends, take time to look through archived Black Friday forums, as some sites keep the old forum posts from several years as reference.  Using advanced search features on the sites, you can look for specific information.  If you want to know what Target or Yankee Candle or Walmart did last year, or for the last several years, you can search for the specific store name, and examine not only the posts that preceded Black Friday, but also those that followed, indicating whether things went smoothly, whether the doorbusters were worthwhile, whether there were any problems with crowd control or availability, whether there was price matching. 

 In my own experience, the snowbird population in our small town leaves minimal competition for big ticket toy items.  Hence, many of the special doorbuster toys are still available later in the mornings, and even through the entire weekend after Thanksgiving Day.  Additionally, the lack of many Black Friday retailers in our immediate vicinity often leads me to do more BF shopping online, where I have the opportunity to get some great deals that I wouldn't be able to access in a brick and mortar environment. 

Your experiences this year will shape your plans for subsequent years, and help you to prioritize your approach down the road.

Thanks to the following photographers at Flickr for use of their photos via Creative Commons Licensing:

AllanCleaver_2000 for Christmas Packages Under Tree

Antijoe for Christmas Lights