Several retailers offer aggressive Black Friday sales

One-day discounts turn into weekend events

By Susanne Ault -- Video Business, 11/9/2007

NOV. 9 | Retailers are expanding Black Friday beyond its traditional one-day sale to offer holiday clearance discounts before and after the day after Thanksgiving and including such new product categories as high-definition players and titles.

With an unprecedented number of $300 million-plus-grossing theatrical films heading to DVD this fourth-quarter holiday season, studios and retailers are working to deliver their best bonanza yet of sales bells and whistles to encourage consumers to also spend on catalog titles.

Studios and retailers are contributing to big DVD title markdowns that will be seen across large and small stores, including $3.50 to $3.99 deals at Sears, F.Y.E., Target and K-Mart, according to various advertisements. The deals cover such blue-chip offerings as Sony Pictures Home Entertainment’s Spider-Man 2 for $3.99 at K-Mart and Warner Home Video’s Batman Begins for $3.98 at Target.

“Black Friday, not unlike Christmas [decorations], comes a little earlier every year,” said one studio executive. “The challenge is to give the consumer a few items that they have never seen before to stimulate an impulse reaction to buy more than they would have otherwise.”

Day-after-Thanksgiving bargains have primarily been the domain of mass merchants. However, F.Y.E. is staking a strong Black Friday presence with a two-day, Friday and Saturday sale featuring such Blu-ray Disc titles as Lionsgate’s September release House of 100 Corpses for as low as $12.99 and HD DVD titles including Universal Studios Home Entertainment’s Meet the Parents for as low as $16.99. The retailer also is listing more than 200 TV DVD sets as buy one, get one free and has priced more than 100 titles, such as Universal’s King Kong, at $4.99.

“If you compare the last two Black Fridays, you did not see many aggressive promotions around Blu-ray,” said David Bishop, Sony worldwide president. “You will this year. I think [Black Friday] will be as bloody [competitively] as it has been the last couple of years. One difference is that there will generally be more high-def activity.”

Best Buy matched a Nov. 2 pre-Black Friday sale by Wal-Mart with its own hefty markdowns, including selling Toshiba’s stand-alone HD DVD player HD-A2 for $99 and HD-A3 for $199, representing $100 off previous widespread retail tags on each product. Best Buy ran its A3 sale Friday through Sunday, longer than Wal-Mart’s one-day jackpot.

“The A3 was a weekend special, Friday through Sunday, and that was separate from what we did with the A2, which came up because of what Wal-Mart was doing,” Best Buy spokesman Brian Lucas said. “We’ll do weekend specials throughout the year, where it’s not necessarily Black Friday or pre-Black Friday, but it’s continuing efforts to roll out special offers to surprise customers.”

Sears will sell the HD-A3 for $169.99 on Black Friday between 5 a.m. and noon.

On the software side, K-Mart is hosting ‘Black Friday’ on Thursday, Thanksgiving Day. Certain Sears items, including DVDs at $3.99, $5.99 and $7.99, will stay sale-priced Friday and Saturday. Target’s sale similarly spans the two days and includes $14.98 TV DVD sets, representing as much as $30 off original pricing.

Studios also are hoping to entice consumers with bargain-priced DVD boxed sets.

Warner is selling $9.99-tagged Four Film Favorites, such as a set of four Steven Seagal movies on one disc, and a slew of premium-priced TV DVD complete series sets, including the $169.98 Full House: The Complete Series Collection.

“This fourth quarter, Warner has designed a program that will appeal to all tastes with low-end values that are unprecedented, and not [just] as a single movie offer,” said Jeff Baker, Warner senior VP and general manager of theatrical catalog and sales. “We are bullish on catalog consumption, driven by the tremendous traffic and interest in DVD from the theatrical tentpoles coming over the next 60 days.”