Better Decisions Through Data.
Black Friday post: stop the madness! These are Actual black Friday shoppers at very long checkout line at a Los Angeles California area big box store (a few years ago). (For our non-US readers, Black Friday is the day after Thanksgiving, traditionally considered the start of the holiday shopping season and known for its suppose discount sales … and large, sometimes dangerous crowds.)
One person in the above line said he’d been waiting in the same Black Friday line for two hours. Oh yeah. The registers? They’re not at the far wall. They are way off to the left. The line snakes U-shaped towards the far wall in the distance first. This particular big box store notorious did door buster specials that year, then obviously had far too few temporary people at the register to handle the crush of shoppers. Infamously, they tend told people they could still get the Black Friday door buster special price off the Internet site. When people then bought off the Internet, the order went through, only to be suddenly canceled a day or two before Xmas with a note that it was “out of stock.”
The person taking this photo took one look at the line, put his Black Friday merchandise back on the shelves, snapped the photo, and walked out of the store — there’s nothing in this store worth a 2+ hour wait in line. Hint to these shoppers: Cyber monday.The store was then empty the next day. The door buster sales were gone, but the regular prices weren’t that much more expensive. (And gridlock traffic was also gone the next day.)
The theme of our blog is “better decisions through data.” Analytics says … these people weren’t valuing their time very highly. If they’d gone online (at a real on-line retailer, not the bigbox store’s own failed site) or just come back the next day they would saved a huge amounts of time. Even if they bought massive amounts of merchandise (and it doesn’t really look it from the photo) the savings can’t possibly justify two hours or more of lost time.
Photo credit: (C) Acculation. Actual big box store shoppers. No affiliation or endorsement is implied or intended. A version of this article originally appeared as a photo post on our Instagram feed
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