Black Friday Is Red Hot!

The infamous Black Friday is inching nearer! (In case you arere not in-the-know, Black Friday is the day after Thanksgiving in which retailers slash prices, leading consumers to camp outside and often results in massive chaos, riots, and all out survival of the fittest! It’s wonderful!)

The retail industry has already made their plan of attack and, although the public may not be privy, they’ve determined what prices they’ll slash that’ll draw us to camp out Thanksgiving night in hopes of getting a bargain.

Several bargains are already listed on some websites with no affiliation to the franchises. I’ll admit that I’ve visited one such website several times this week. The site had links to what use to be the listings of some stores, however the links had to be removed because those stores sent legal notices for the website to remove the info.

As a business person, I can see the pros and cons of having your promotion listed too early – people may stop shopping in order to wait for the deal. But let’s be realistic here, how many people are willing to camp outside for hours to save a couple hundred dollars? Even if there are a lot of people willing to do so, the store will only sell a limited number of the sale items. So, there’s already a limited amount of people who will actually get the deal. Do these stores really think the rest of us, who missed out on the special simply won’t shop? That’s silly. We’ve probably worked ourselves up so much thinking about the coveted item that even if we miss the sale, we’ll still buy it. All it would take is a little suggestive selling on the part of a witty salesman to get me signing on the dotted line.

So what can the free publicity offered by these Black Friday websites really hurt? In fact, it can help in many ways. If I don’t see an ad for what’s on sale, I won’t waste my time in line, but I will be sitting outside your competitor’s door because I know what they’re offering.

Black Friday may not affect the self storage or property management industry directly, but don’t miss out on the small window of opportunity it brings. As much as I love snopping around for my Christmas presents, I love hiding them from my loved ones just as much. Some of us go to great links to protect the element of surprise – self storage is the perfect place to store larger gifts until Santa brings them home. You can do some suggestive selling of your own and remind tenants and new customers that self storage is a smart way to keep gifts, or even store decorations when it’s time to take the tinsel down.

Written by Sarah Little, TQA Director

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Disclamer: This entry is intended to promote our partner StorageMart and some or all participants received compensation.

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