Shop-till-you-drop specials, revealed here first
Retailers are furious that consumers are learning their Black Friday shopping secrets.
Prices are scientifically slashed down to the penny. Sales begin at dawn. And glossy circulars containing well-laid plans are distributed just a day or two ahead to keep consumers and competitors in the dark.
Or at least that is how it worked before people like Michael Brim came along. From a cramped dorm room in California, Brim, an 18-year-old college freshman who dines on Lucky Charms and says he rarely shops, is abruptly pulling back the curtain on the biggest shopping day of the year.
His Web site, BF2005.com, publishes the circulars for what retailers call Black Friday--the day that officially starts the holiday shopping season. And he's doing it weeks ahead of time.
So far this year, sources have leaked advertisements to him from Toys "R" Us (showing the Barbie Fashion Show Mall, regularly $99.99, for $29.97); Sears (a Canon ZR100 MiniDV camcorder, regularly $329.99, for $249.99); and Ace Hardware (a Skil 12-volt drill, regularly $44.99, for $24.99).
Brim says his motive is to educate consumers. But retailers are furious, arguing that the site jeopardizes their holiday business, and they have threatened legal action.
But BF2005.com is not their only problem. There are now at least three Web sites dedicated to digging up Black Friday sales secrets, creating a fierce competition to post the ads first.
It is so heated, in fact, that all three sites stamp the circulars with bright electronic watermarks to discourage rivals from stealing a scoop.
The renegade sites, whose popularity is growing, highlight how much the Web is shifting the balance of power in retailing from companies to consumers.
Big national chains used to control discounts carefully, and shoppers were lucky to stumble into a sale at a store or receive an e-mail message promising free shipping. Today, however, online forums encourage strangers to exchange hard-to-find online coupon codes, and they offer instructions on how to combine rebates with one-day sales to cut retail prices in half.
For the discount warriors who run these sites, Black Friday is the best chance to share their techniques, not to mention their zeal, with the masses who pay full price.
"It's the day that even the average Joe becomes a professional bargain hunter," said Brim, an electrical engineering student at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo, Calif., who finances his Web site through ads placed there by Google.
Black Friday, so named because it traditionally was the point when retailers started to earn a profit (went into the black) for the year, is now more of a social ritual than a make-or-break financial moment. (A company that waited until the second-to-last month of the year to make money would probably face an investor revolt.)
Still, it remains a lucrative day for retailers. In 2004, consumers spent about $8 billion on the day after Thanksgiving, compared with $4 billion on the next Friday, according to ShopperTrak, a retail research firm. "This is a significant day for them," said Bill Martin, ShopperTrak's co-founder.
Significant enough, in fact, that lawyers for Sears, Roebuck sent a letter this month warning Brim that his site infringed on the chain's trade secrets and copyright. It gave him 48 hours to remove scanned copies of the Black Friday circulars for Kmart and Sears (now owned by Kmart) and a typed list of the deals from his site. He took down the ads, but he left the product lists up under the labels "Sbears" and "J+1Mart."
Brim said he believed that posting copies of the ads was a "legal gray area," adding, "It's not like we are posting pirated materials, just materials the public would see in a few weeks anyway."
But Andrew Beckerman-Rodau, co-director of the intellectual property program at the Suffolk University Law School in Boston, said the legal issue in such a case was black and white. "You cannot reproduce copyrighted material" without permission, he said.
Brim, a computer whiz whose classes include physics and multivariable calculus, is an unlikely figure to shake up American retailing. He rarely leaves campus to eat, let alone go to the mall.
Even though his site advertises hundreds of clothing deals, he does not, he says, pay any attention to fashion. Most days he runs from class back to his dorm to check on his Web site, snacking on a buffet of Pringles, Lucky Charms and Pepperidge Farm Milano cookies laid out on his bookshelf.
But Brim is obsessed with bargains. He recalls watching his mother and father debate which big-screen television to buy--a 42-inch model for $1,500 at Costco or a 65-inch version for $1,700 from a local electronics store. (They took the bigger one. "More bang for the buck," Brim said.)
When Dell offered a coupon for $750 off a computer purchase over $1,500 this summer, Brim bought six laptops, then sold them for a profit of $200 apiece.
Brim said the idea for the Black Friday Web site came to him three years ago when he discovered ads from retailers like Best Buy and Wal-Mart circulating in online forums well before Thanksgiving. Patient Web surfers could track down all the discounts if they had two hours to spend, but Brim wanted to organize the deals on a single site that would operate from mid-October to the end of November.
Bf2004.net, which Brim set up at home when he was a high school senior, described itself as "the ultimate collection of rumored" Black Friday deals.
Brim said the site had cost roughly $600 to operate: $10 for the domain name and the rest to pay for computer servers. At first, he borrowed leaked circulars from the forums. But as the site gained a modest following (Brim estimated more than 200,000 visitors a week) it attracted what he wanted most: a steady stream of retail circulars.
Brim says he does not know the full identities of the leakers. Judging by the quality of the copies, which generally arrive as digital images or scanned copies, he suspects they are either from store employees or printing plant workers, neither of whom, he conceded, may be authorized to distribute the circulars.
Those who want to leak an ad have plenty of options. Besides Brim, there is Brad Olson, 26, who runs Gottadeal.com out of his parents' house near Milwaukee, and Alan Smolek, 21, who runs BlackFridayAds.com from his apartment near Chicago.
The three sites openly compete, like newspapers chasing the same news tip, to publish the contents of big circulars first. Gottadeal.com scored perhaps the season's biggest coup when Olson obtained a copy of Wal-Mart's Black Friday ad in late October.
Since then, Olson has been first to post the circulars of Best Buy, OfficeMax and Kohl's, among others. Brim was the first to post ads from Kmart, Toys "R" Us and Radio Shack.
BlackFridayAds.com was the first to post ads from CompUSA.
Because the sites occasionally lift one another's circulars, each etches its name across every ad in capital letters. Gottadeal.com even inserted the image of the "Baywatch" star David Hasselhoff on Page 3 of this year's Sears circular as "an extra security measure," Mr. Olson said.
In 2004, both Sears and Home Depot asked Gottadeal.com to remove their circulars. Olson complied. But "the majority of stores don't care," he said. "It's free publicity for them."
Not all retailers see it that way. "We would rather the information not be out there," said Charles Hodges, a spokesman for Radio Shack. "We like to surprise people when they get their circulars in the mail."
Jerry Shields, a spokesman for Home Depot, said that by tipping off the public to Black Friday bargains weeks in advance, the Web sites "could enable competing retailers to react and change their plans."
Disclaimers on the three Black Friday Web sites warn that the discounts are speculation and rumor. But the warnings appear to be half-hearted. The "frequently asked questions" section of BlackFridayAds.com states archly, "We believe the deals posted to be very good guesses (wink, wink)."
Publicly, retail executives declined to confirm the accuracy of the circulars on the Black Friday sites. Several acknowledged, however, that they are correct and expressed dismay that either their own employees or outsiders hired to print the ads were leaking them.
"We wouldn't want this to become a habit, by any means," said Hodges, the Radio Shack representative.
Brim has already registered a new site for next holiday season. And he is still waiting for two big circulars this week to round out his 2005 collection: Circuit City and Target. His biggest fear is that a source will leak one of them while he is in class.
"In physics I'll be thinking about Black Friday," he said. "It's almost an obsession."
Cindy Chang contributed reporting from San Luis Obispo, Calif., for this article.
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