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Thursday, March 28
The Indiana Daily Student

Gap closing between traditional retailers, online stores for Black Friday

Black Friday may be the one day a year it’s socially acceptable to fight for the last dancing Elmo at Walmart.

However, more and more, Americans have been waiting for online sales instead of staking out spots in front of retail stores on Black Friday. This year marks the turning point for retail stores, said John Talbott, associate director of the Center for Education and Research in Retailing, in an IU news release.

This year the gap between major online retailers, such as Amazon, and traditional retail stores’ websites continues to close, according to Talbott.

“Three years ago, brick-and-mortar retailers sometimes perceived their own websites as competition,” Talbott said in the release. “Today’s best retailers are omni-channel — meaning they allow the consumer to choose how to engage, whether in stores, through the Web or even with mobile applications. These omni-channel retailers increasingly use ‘show-rooming’ techniques to display goods to consumers in the physical store and are indifferent about whether consumers make their purchases online or off.”

Additionally, brick-and-mortar stores have begun using their stores to their advantage in online retailing by shipping items directly from their stores to the customer, Talbott said in the release.

“While Amazon rapidly builds warehouses around the country, many traditional retailers have realized that they can actively use their stores in the same way and efficiently get purchased goods to consumers quickly,” he said in the release.

Last year, many stores began opening their doors on Thanksgiving instead of the day after, a controversial move, according to the release. This year, Black Friday events are up to week earlier.

Traditional retailers also encourage use of the Web by offering special deals and coupons on their website.

“It makes sense in a lot of ways. One, it is less expensive to deploy those coupons, because they just exist as ones and zeros,” Talbott said in the release. “But the reality also is that when people are doing their research for shopping, they’re doing it online. So why make them go to the trouble of having to tear something out of a flier when you can embed the ability to get value while they are in the process of looking for their gifts?”

The “early Black Friday” promotions may not have much actual value to consumers, though.

“It depends on what you mean by discounting,” Talbott said in the release. “These are planned promotions. Retailers own those products well, and they’ve actively gone out and sought value for their customers, been able to acquire them, and then they transferred that value to the ?consumer.”

The early Black Friday sales serve to restructure the limited holiday-shopping time over a longer period of time. This can help stores when bad weather may prevent consumers from walking into their stores, lowering fourth-quarter sales activity.

“There’s all kinds of evidence to suggest that the economic capability is economic capability, and no amount of the work on the part of the retailer takes a season that was going to be at 2 or 3 percent and builds it into something at 10 percent — that just doesn’t happen,” Talbott said in the release.

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