November 2011
todayifoundout.com →
todayifoundout.com
Black Friday Facts:
- Nearly 135 million people go out to shop on Black Friday every year.
- In 2010: 212million shoppers spent $39billion for an average spending amount of $365.34
- In 2008, Jdimytai Damour, a Long Island Walmart temporary employee was trampled to death on Black Friday when shoppers at Green Acres Shopping Center, impatient with waiting for the store to open, pushed against the doors to try to get them to open. Workers pushed back to try to keep the doors from breaking, but ultimately the masses won out and over 2000 people streamed in, trampling Damour. The paramedics who arrived and tried to save Damour were also trampled and seriously injured by shoppers who apparently didn’t care that there was a dying man lying at the entrance of the store with paramedics trying to resuscitate him. All total, five shoppers had to be hospitalized at that one location.
- Shop.org executives came up with the bright idea for “Cyber Monday”, even though the Monday after Thanksgiving historically never previously saw any up-tick in online sales over any other day around that time, with online sales seeing their actual peak days between December 5th and December 15th. This campaign has seen marginal success, but not enough for most online retailers to latch on to the idea. Instead, there has been a big push lately for “Cyber Black Friday”, encouraging people to avoid the masses and stay home and shop online. This campaign has been much more successful than Cyber Monday, with sales reaching as high as a half a billion dollars in 2009, which is over double what it was in 2008.
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