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Happy Black Friday 2017
Happy Christmas Shopping Season, my friends. I hope you are doing what you do and enjoying your holiday weekend. I’m not one for Black Friday shopping. As an introvert, I’m generally opposed to being where a crowd is. That’s just not my scene.
The Pros
The upside of Black Friday shopping is that you can get some incredible deals. The retailers have figured out how to structure their sales to account for those who are willing to stand in line outside of a store for hours. Despite the videos of jam-packed stores and people cramming through doors like a cattle stampede, the overall percentage of people who are willing to subject themselves to this lunacy is actually fairly small. The retailers have worked out how many of which discount items to set aside for these promotions. Additionally, the mania is really only present in the initial hours of the day. When the campers have laid siege to the store and pillaged all of the limited-time discount items they can fit into a shopping cart or two, they will move on to the next store on their hit list like a plague of locusts. Like a plague of locusts, they come and they go. Once they have gone, there are successive waves of progressively less aggressive shoppers. There are still deals for these late-in-the-day folks, but the ultra-special specials are picked over and long gone. This helps the retailers clear overstocked items and it helps perpetuate the mystique of Black Friday shopping.
It’s a lesson that we can learn from as information marketers. It’s certainly not as easy to create the kind of hype or hysteria that you find in a Black Friday Sale, but it’s not at all impossible. The great thing is, you don’t even have to wait for Black Friday. With physical merchandise, the built-in hype that comes with the holiday shopping season is a calendar item you can’t afford to pass up. With intellectual merchandise, the holiday shopping season is neither here nor there. You can create a Black Friday on demand if you can frame your information in terms of being latest and greatest insider information. A bit of teasing that you’re sitting on something big for a few weeks prior to a product release can create nearly as much buzz as a Black Friday door-buster sale.
The Cons
The downside of Black Friday shopping is being crammed into a store with some of the most rude, aggressive, annoying, selfish, rabid jackasses in the civilized world. Trying to navigate aisles that are usually readily passable becomes nearly impossible as the kind of self-obsessed cretins who indulge in Black Friday shopping inspect every item with the jaundiced eye of a senior QA analyst before dropping it unceremoniously into an already over-full cart. Any consideration for others? Hell, no. Any notion of letting someone get by so they can get to the items at the end of the section that these creeps aren’t even interested in? Hell to the absolute no! Why, you might get to a bargain before them if they let you past. You might get in their way when they’re ready to barge on to the next attention-getting SALE sticker. Bah humbug! I’d just as soon stay in bed until next Tuesday when all the shopping frenzy has finally abated.
It’s a benefit of being an online information marketer. You might have to deal with rude refunders and scammers of all variety, but you don’t have to have a zillion of them all up in your grill. You put your sales page up and drive the traffic. If there’s a problem (or a scam to be attempted), you can deal with them via OsTicket in your own good time. You don’t have a throng of jerks pushing and shoving people to get your information products. Nobody is getting their spleen crushed against a customer service counter as a dozen people dogpile on their back trying to get their needs attended to PDQ so they can get back to shopping and raiding a dozen more stores before noon. Freaking people.
So, yeah. Absolutely no Black Friday shopping for me, thank you. I’m perfectly fine paying full retail price for the pleasure of not having to deal with throngs of slavering loonies.