Black Friday Starts Now for Savvy Shoppers
If you love Black Friday bargains, but hate the idea of pre-dawn lines, surly shoppers, and the risk of bodily harm just to score a bargain Blu-ray player or Xbox console, major U.S. retailers have an alternative: Why not shop early?
Context & Ripple Effects
The high-definition disc war ended in Blu-ray's favor by early 2008, and holiday-season discounting was already its decisive weapon — both camps had spent the 2007 season cutting prices and bundling free movies. Yet by mid-2009 the win hadn't converted: a Harris Poll showed US household adoption of Blu-ray players still lagging, leaving price as the remaining barrier.
Against that backdrop, PC World reports major U.S. retailers opening Black Friday-style bargains early this November — with Blu-ray players and Xbox consoles among the headline items — trading the traditional pre-dawn doorbuster scramble for a longer buying window.
First-order effects
- Shoppers can buy discounted Blu-ray players and Xbox consoles weeks before Thanksgiving instead of lining up at dawn, spreading retailer traffic and register volume across early November.
- For Blu-ray, whose post-format-war adoption remained slow as of June 2009, aggressive early holiday pricing puts hardware under the $100-ish impulse threshold that the Harris Poll numbers suggested was missing.
Second-order effects
- Rival retailers who planned to hold their prices until the Friday after Thanksgiving face a choice between matching the early discounts — eroding November margins across the board — or ceding the first wave of console and player purchases to competitors.
- Every discounted player sold into a living room feeds the high-margin disc rental and purchase market that studios and Microsoft's console ecosystem depend on, so the discount burden gets partially repaid downstream in software attach.
Third-order effects
- If pulling the sale date forward works once, Black Friday stops being a day and becomes a season — compressing full-price selling time in Q4 and structurally rewarding retailers with the inventory depth and online fulfillment to sustain weeks of promotions.
- For the consumer-electronics categories involved, holiday pricing effectively becomes the industry's adoption engine: formats and platforms win living rooms on November shelf prices, not on technical merit alone.
The trend: Black Friday is decoupling from a single late-November date into an extended discount season, with cheap disc players and consoles doing the market-adoption work that the format war's outcome alone couldn't.