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Wal-Mart Jump-Starts Discounts for Holidays
In what is shaping up to be the earliest holiday shopping season ever, Wal-Mart Stores says it will offer door-buster discounts this Friday, three weeks before they are traditionally unveiled on the day after Thanksgiving.
The giant discount chain is expected to announce a plan today to sell five major products — like a $350 laptop — beginning at 8 a.m. on Friday in a bold effort to jump-start holiday shopping two days after Halloween.
The move is likely to put growing pressure on Wal-Mart’s competitors, like Best Buy and Toys “R” Us, to begin marking down merchandise well ahead of Nov. 23, known as Black Friday because it was historically the day stores turned a profit, or went into the black.
The pre-Thanksgiving price-cutting underscores how worried the retail industry is about consumer spending this season. With the housing market in a slump and energy prices high, industry analysts expect retail sales in November and December to grow at the slowest rate in five years.
In the phenomenon of “creeping Christmas,” stores like CompUSA and Gap have begun opening their doors at midnight on Thanksgiving to drum up business, delighting some bargainhunting consumers and irritating some others who bemoan the earlier-than-ever start to the season.
But no retailer has ever tried to single-handedly move Black Friday, considered the biggest shopping day of the year.
Linda Blakley, a spokeswoman for Wal-Mart, said that consumers “are feeling all kinds of pressure, but because part of our DNA is to provide great prices on the gifts people buy, we are starting to do that early.”
Four of the five products will remain secret until Thursday morning, when they can be found — but not bought — on the walmart.com Web site. Shoppers can begin buying them in stores at 8 a.m. on Friday, where the company expects the kind of long, early-morning lines that are common on Black Friday.
By keeping the products secret until the last minute, Wal-Mart will avoid the risk of newspaper circulars leaking out onto the Internet weeks before the sale, as Black Friday ads now regularly do, much to retailers’ chagrin.
Ms. Blakley said Wal-Mart would still offer Black Friday deals on Nov. 23. “This,” she said, “is an early Christmas gift to our customers.”
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