Today's moment of WTF?!
Nov. 25th, 2005 08:04 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
poltr111/25/05: 5 AM? You've got to be kiddding me!
It's Black Friday, folks. The day after Thanksgiving, when retail merchants pull out all the stops, put lots of things on deep discount, and open their doors at insanely early hours.
But why do stores even do this? Is it because they expect customers to be queued up at this hour in the morning? Or is it because customers expect or demand this sort of thing? Or does it have to so with the magic word "SALE"?
I can understand why retailers now rolling out their Christmas stuff immediately after Halloween: To eliminate this early-bird rush. Or so I thought, until today.
They might as well take the example from the Harry Potter booksigning and open the stores at 12:01am. But the folks who work for retail merchants will revolt.
Speaking of the folks who work the sales floors.....this early-bird crap isn't their idea. I'm sure they'd rather sleep in and come in at a more reasonable hour, like 9am. But nooooo! Management says, "We're opening early today, and you'd better be there."
And some folks who don't work retail jobs, like R, have a "forced vacation day". The office is closed, but it's not a paid holiday, so the workers there have to burn 8 hours of vacation or PTO time.
As for me.....what do you get for the man who has everything? A place to put it all. Or the universal gift: cash.
All I want for Christmas is a debt-free life,
My credit cards
All paid in full
All I want for Christmas is a debt-free life,
So I can skip the monthly payments.
It's Black Friday, folks. The day after Thanksgiving, when retail merchants pull out all the stops, put lots of things on deep discount, and open their doors at insanely early hours.
But why do stores even do this? Is it because they expect customers to be queued up at this hour in the morning? Or is it because customers expect or demand this sort of thing? Or does it have to so with the magic word "SALE"?
I can understand why retailers now rolling out their Christmas stuff immediately after Halloween: To eliminate this early-bird rush. Or so I thought, until today.
They might as well take the example from the Harry Potter booksigning and open the stores at 12:01am. But the folks who work for retail merchants will revolt.
Speaking of the folks who work the sales floors.....this early-bird crap isn't their idea. I'm sure they'd rather sleep in and come in at a more reasonable hour, like 9am. But nooooo! Management says, "We're opening early today, and you'd better be there."
And some folks who don't work retail jobs, like R, have a "forced vacation day". The office is closed, but it's not a paid holiday, so the workers there have to burn 8 hours of vacation or PTO time.
As for me.....what do you get for the man who has everything? A place to put it all. Or the universal gift: cash.
All I want for Christmas is a debt-free life,
My credit cards
All paid in full
All I want for Christmas is a debt-free life,
So I can skip the monthly payments.
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no subject
Date: 2005-11-25 01:19 pm (UTC)Because it works. No more, no less.
People who have never worked closely with marketing folks often seem to assign nefarious motives to them, but to be honest, it's just a very specialized form of applied sociology. Which isn't to say that individual companies or even industries don't do unethical things, but most of them don't do it with the mindset of "this will screw over huge numbers of people", simply "this will generate more dollars for our bank account."
no subject
Date: 2005-11-25 01:38 pm (UTC)Hurm.
When I was younger, and a lot more naive, I thought S&M stood for "Sales and Marketing". Maybe I wasn't so far off the mark.