Black Friday Round-up

This year’s Black Friday events weren’t far off from what we usually expect to go down on one of the busiest shopping days of the year. Granted we were overly stuffed and seemingly unresponsive on the couch, plenty of folks still made it out for the day’s festivities. Oh, and what festivities those were; for the first time ever, stores opened their ‘red-tag’ doors earlier than usual. Stores like Target, Macy*s, and Kohl’s, for the first time ever, opened their Black Friday doors at midnight Friday morning. This year we were also witness to another first; Cyber Monday’s revenue. Yes, this year online retailers are offering items for a discount and it sure did help boost the economy; the online sales this past Cyber Monday brought in over one billion dollars to retailer across the web. Usually a company that runs both in store and online would only offer their deals and discounts in store. However, this year most companies had online offers as well and if they didn’t, it was because they reserved the deals for Cyber Monday, the Black Friday of the inter webs. Of course not everyone participated in what has almost become a national holiday for shoppers and bargainers alike. Some retailers chose to stick with simple, not in season discounts while others (cough, high-end retailers, cough) had no sales or bargains. And I don’t know about you, but with all this internet traffic and crazy deals, I started to get a little suspicious. The chance for falling victim to fraud on the internet has to have a high statistic; it was even reported that over 150 websites were seized by the federal government due to the sales of counterfeit merchandise. Make sure when you are shopping for name brand merchandise you are getting what you are paying for; i.e. your dad doesn’t want an NPL jersey and your mom doesn’t want a perfume by Dolce & Cabana. Well, we are left with less than a month to get all of our gifts…safe shopping.