Just happened to be out shopping this morning and I noticed a big difference from last year's craziest sale day: Almost every place that sold tvs had plenty of them still in stock. Even the 'doorbuster' sale ones. Usually these areas are beyond ransacked at 9am. Instead, it seems most of the smaller stuff that I was going for was sold out. Is it like this in your area? Any other year I would see folks rolling out pallets of 42'' tvs-but I found that much more disturbing than what I saw this year.

Are we surprised? Up until last year, the buying public was using credit cards, which they'd run up to $25K or so every year, then refinance their houses for astronomically over-appraised values, pay off the credit cards, and do it again. This went on from 1995 until about 20 months ago. No more! And the wiser people who spent "earned" income have stopped spending that too. We're at the beginning of something that will eclipse the Great Depression. I hate to be negative, but the truth hurts. In this case, the American consumer has come down with a very serious, self-inflicted infection, and it will take a very painful series of shots with enormous needles, deep into the buttocks, over a long period of time, to cure it.

Charles

Maybe the disease IS the cure, after all. We shall see.

as suze orman says now it,s a pay as you go society.

as suze orman says now it,s a pay as you go society.
I picked up a doorbuster Sansui 19" LCD TV for $178 at Wal-Mart today, which is made by Orion. It's made similar to Toshiba. It was abandoned by a customer at the men clothing section. Your report saying that Orion-made Toshiba TVs have been pretty good in reliability, and I wonder if the LCD is the same thing?

Over dinner yesterday my brother-in-law was trying to talk his Dad into braving Wally*World today to get a 32" that he wanted. Said that last year the place was so packed that they had armed guards inside and out for protection. I bet things are different this go around.

Well The day is now over. I survived our Wal-Mart black friday. Recession, I don't think so, at least not at our store. Our sales were up substantially from last year. We had done about $340,000 in sales in our electronics department by 9 pm and still were going strong. That is about $75,000 more than last year for the entire day and about $60,000 more than the year before that. Lots more cash than usual as well. In fact I did nore large cash sales than credit sales. People would come up and just pull out wads of $100's. We went through lots of tv's, and small items. What we had left were $29 printers and $598 Dell computers. We even had tv's shipped from another local store to our store for the comming weekend.


Tired,
Bill R

I've never been inside a Walmart store. It must have been crazy there though.:yes: Brad

It occurs to me that there are plenty of small tv shops out there (or were) that would be happy to gross $340K in a year.

I would have kept my service center if I was making $340K in a year.
Black Friday is an interesting thing. In our store we rope off the areas where the "deals" are located and bring the merchandise out about an hour or so before the sale. We have maps printed for the customers and the stuff is spread out all over the store. TV's may be by groceries, Toys may be in electronics, etc, but not always. It is like a big treasure hunt. We don't even know until the last minutes where or how many of an item is located. We have associates posted to hand out the merchandise and keep customers out until the start of the sale. At 5am we cut the baricade tape or rope and the customers are allowed in the areas. It sounds like a small heard of elephants coming through the store. The roar just grows and grows until about mid morning. Then it will slack off some while customers hit all the other sales. By Noon it is full tilt again until about midnight. You just have to be there. Our store will do between $900K and one million dollars in sales in this one day. We do over $100million in sales per year at our store.

Bill R

That kind of profit would keep alot of Ma and Pa shops in business. Come to think of it.... that's why I've never been in a Walmart store.:yes: Brad

WalMart and Costco are the only retailers that are reporting any sales... It's grim at all of the malls, and K-Mart just announced that they're not going to survive this Christmas season, and they've put out the final clearance/out-of-business signs at all of the Los Angeles area stores :(

Charles

For the life of me, I cannot understand this. I feel like I'm watching some kind of experiment on human behavior from another planet.

Believe me, I understand the idea of a good bargain. Sometimes I'll get 10% off Home Depot coupons, so I load-up on "staples" like masking tape, black spray paint, bags of cement, in addition to the one major purchase that made me use the coupon (like a $200 tool or something). I'll even call friends/parents and ask if they wanna get in on the deal, since they're usually good up to a $1000.

But to lower myself to "shopping-on-command" like some kind of lab rat, in the name of CHRISTmas no less, absolutely sickens me. My human dignity is worth more to me than a good price on some slave-labor piece of shit. I wouldn't act that way for a danish-modern Zenith combo-roundie, let alone some disgusting pixel-displayer that will be rotting in a landfill relatively soon.

Maybe I'm out of touch, but is $718.00 that great a price for this 37" TV?
http://i.walmartimages.com/i/p/00/07/40/00/37/0007400037092_150X150.jpg

Big whoop! $700 is still too much money for a TV, let alone the $1200 for the "big deal" Sony. I looked-up Black Friday ads from 2005, and the big item was 25" CRT TV's for $89. You couldn't pay people $89 to fish one out of the trash 3-years later.

feh!

It's subjective. I bet if someone had a working CT-100 with an NOS CRT in it that he wanted only $100.00 for, a lot of members here would dive on a grenade to acquire that TV.

In any case, none of the crap they're selling this year is dragging me into a store. I'll go to one to do my Christmas shopping, and get a little something for myself, but no way am I going to purchase some big ticket item that'll just break in 3 years.

Those numbers are gross sales, not profit. Actual profit is much less than the gross sales, but still substantial.
K-mart here is not doing well either. Their problems however are not related to WalMart. If WalMart does not change some of it's policies though I think they will follow in K-marts path. Low wages and crappy treatment will never change when there are hundreds of people stand in line for the jobs. I wonder why nobody complains about Lowes and Home Depot, they have done to the local "mom and pop" hardware stores the same thing WalMart has done to smaller retailers, but that is not a problem.
I personally didn't think any of the stuff was that good of a bargain. At least I wouldn't stand in line and fight the crowds for any of them.
While $700 is a lot of money for a tv, it may not be that far out of line for what it is. For example in the 60's a 25inch color set started at $400, and a set in a nice cabinet with all the bells and whistles and remote control was $700 to $900 dollars or more. In the 70's a Magnavox Star System set retailed at $1200. Considering wages back then a tv at those prices was a much larger investment than the $700 lcd set today. In 2005 crt sets were 50 year old technology and being replaced by newer technology. When lcd sets are 50 years old they will be dirt cheap as well.

Bill R

When lcd sets are 50 years old they will be dirt cheap as well.


50-years? I predict they'll be dirt cheap in less than 5.

I understand that the old sets were actually pricier than they are today, but back then it was something you decorated around, shopped for, and paid to service. They were also the "first" of something quite magical.

Modern sets, as wonderful as they are, are simply commodities puked out of the same factory in the Donhg-Fwack province of China. I can spend .01% of the money, and buy something that does the job 90% as well that can be repaired when it breaks.

People don't hate Lowes & Depot because they don't have the reputation of filing briefs on behalf of Chinese electronic companies for the WTO, just so they could keep dumping $149 TV sets down our throats.

http://www.nlcnet.org/campaigns/archive/chinareport/RCA.shtml

Plus Lowes & Depot don't have parking lots filled with poopy diapers! :yuck:

When lcd sets are 50 years old they will be dirt cheap as well.
Bill R

LCD sets will not be dirt cheap 50 yrs from now, they'll just be dirt :thmbsp:

A Wal Mart employee in New York got trampled and died on Black Friday. The door of the store got tore off the hinges. As emergency people tried to revive him people just stepped over him. When they closed the store the shoppers got angry and said they waiting since Thursday morning. They werent going to let anything like somebody dying come between them and getting that piece of crap 19" Sansui flat screen that weighs 2 pounds in the box. What has this world come to? Very sad.
John

I think a lot of people equate getting a perceived "bargain" as the same thing as saving money.

"SAVE MONEY BY BUYING OUR STUFF!!"

No thanks. I'll save even more money by NOT buying your stuff.

A Wal Mart employee in New York got trampled and died on Black Friday. The door of the store got tore off the hinges. As emergency people tried to revive him people just stepped over him. When they closed the store the shoppers got angry and said they waiting since Thursday morning. They werent going to let anything like somebody dying come between them and getting that piece of crap 19" Sansui flat screen that weighs 2 pounds in the box. What has this world come to? Very sad.
John

People died while building the Hoover Dam (did they change the name of it again ?)
A worker ran to the aid of a fellow worker who died when he got ran over by a bulldozer.
The supervisor said "Get back to work or you will be fired, you can't help him now." That is reality.
People were a lot more desparate for jobs than they are now, so the world has not changed much.

http://www.nlcnet.org/campaigns/archive/chinareport/RCA.shtml


25 years ago I used to work for the old RCA Smirnoff R&D Lab in Princetion NJ. Back then the markup of our TVs was about 400%. Price in a store was about 4x what it cost to make the damm thing and have it boxed and ready to ship at the shipping dock at the factory in Bloomington Indiana. That's when a 19 inch RCA TV with a comb filter cost me about $400 in 1982 (a CTC101). And I was happy to pay it, a good price at the time.

I suppose there will be a time in the far future when we run out of third world toilets to get stuff made at 25 cents an hour. There's most of Africa that hasn't been touched yet, Afghanistan, and such places too.

Hopefully sooner or later everyone will be at USA levels, and do it in a healthy biosphere. Didn't say that would be easy to make happen...

Are we surprised? Up until last year, the buying public was using credit cards, which they'd run up to $25K or so every year, then refinance their houses for astronomically over-appraised values, pay off the credit cards, and do it again. This went on from 1995 until about 20 months ago. No more! And the wiser people who spent "earned" income have stopped spending that too. We're at the beginning of something that will eclipse the Great Depression. I hate to be negative, but the truth hurts. In this case, the American consumer has come down with a very serious, self-inflicted infection, and it will take a very painful series of shots with enormous needles, deep into the buttocks, over a long period of time, to cure it.

Charles

Charles, I have to commend you for saying this, because I've been warning people about the exact same thing for years. The truth hurts, but it needs to be told - we are in the early stages of the Second Great Depression. People are not going to be able to afford the LCD and plasma junk for long.

I've been trying throughout this year to collect as many CRT televisions as possible at the thrift stores. I may still pick up one or two more after the holidays are over.

But to lower myself to "shopping-on-command" like some kind of lab rat, in the name of CHRISTmas no less, absolutely sickens me. My human dignity is worth more to me than a good price on some slave-labor piece of shit. I wouldn't act that way for a danish-modern Zenith combo-roundie, let alone some disgusting pixel-displayer that will be rotting in a landfill relatively soon.




Amen. I bet the person who got trampled to death at one of the NYC area
Walmarts when the doors opened would have agreed.

I, for one, equate Lowes & Home Depot to Wal*Mart. I will personally exhaust all other avenues before shopping at any of them. It tears me, because on one hand, I am a small businessman and applaud their success. On the other hand, I am a small businessman-and I know that if they were in direct competition with me I'd be in deep trouble.

I will admit this: there is a degree of excitement from being in a Wal*Mart (or wherever) on black Friday (or Christmas Eve). You don't have to be there to buy anything, just to observe. I don't know if its good or bad. Last Dec.24th I volunteered as a bell ringer for the Salvation Army and they put be in front of the Wal*Mart. It was a good experience. I did note that I saw more new TV sets roll out that door while I was there than most independent shops would sell in many, many months.

Hello!
This shows what happened at an electronic market opening in Germany last year. The language is german but everyone will see what's going on. Police was present from the beginnig at midnight until two in the morning :scratch2:
http://de.youtube.com/watch?v=RR0S_coLqPg
Greetings Josef