Time is money for retailers on Black Friday

The cashier smiles apologetically as both members of a shopping couple place on the counter discount coupons clipped from a newspaper flier; she explains that just one of the discounts can be applied per item.

Not to worry, the shoppers reply; neither had realized the other had clipped the coupon.

The cashier looks relieved, explaining that a few days before another shopper had presented multiple coupons to be applied to a single item, and was indignant when told that wasn’t how it worked.

Maybe it was inattention to the fine print, or an attempt at creativity that drove that shopper to a belief that one could theoretically present a fistful of coupons with the goal of driving the purchase price toward zero.

Or perhaps it was the pursuit of any angle, no matter how unlikely, to shave even a few cents off the purchase of some item.

It’s the same attitude that drives retailers to leapfrog one another in the starting times for post-Thanksgiving shopping, to the point that stores eventually will set up Christmas decorations, extend operating hours and start offering Christmas-themed deals about Labor Day.

Such is the climate as we approach the unofficial launch of the holiday season on the Friday after Thanksgiving. For both sides – sellers and consumers – there’s almost an air of desperation.

The retailers are to the point of trying most anything to get shoppers in the stores and spend something. The shoppers, meanwhile, have become so attuned to the expectation of discounts that any offer is likely to be greeted by, “Is this going to be even lower tomorrow?”

If there’s a sector of American business that’s almost as unhappy at the moment as housing (except maybe media, but then we’re always complaining about something), it would be retailing.

The surges in spending fueled by economic bubbles like housing and the dot-com bust as well as by easy credit are long gone. Malls and strip-centers are dotted by storefronts gussied up with murals to disguise the collapse of yet another retailer. If there’s a hit product that might stir the public to part with money, it’s possible that the brand itself is selling it (such as Amazon with Kindle). Speaking of Amazon, the defection of shoppers to online is yet another headache that will persist even when (if) the recession ends.

The consumer, meanwhile, is exercising an overdue thriftiness that leads to closed wallets and a grumpy suspicion that if those wallets were to open, someone somewhere sometime would be getting a better bargain.

What would break the gloom? A recovery might help, but regular readers of this space know of the proprietor’s pessimism that anything truly robust is in the offing. More radical might be a major retailer, or group of them, doing an honest and exhaustive accounting of the cost of special deals, keeping stores open longer and encroaching even more on the Thanksgiving holiday (thus annoying employees and much of the public).

What they might get from such a fiscal review is a realization that whatever cash flow such measures generate isn’t compensated for by the added expense and doesn’t add anything to competitive position. Some retailer might even be emboldened to say, “Hey, sleep in on Black Friday. We’ll open at a reasonable hour, we’ll do our best to give you good value and the deals will still be here no matter what time you show up.”

That’s going to be tough to accomplish. The lure of the familiar is tough to break for people and companies alike, even if no one particularly likes that way of operating. But dress it up as a special, limited-edition one-time only deal and maybe someone will go for it.

Bill Virgin is editor and publisher of Washington Manufacturing Alert and Pacific Northwest Rail News. He can be reached at bill.virgin@yahoo.com.