Fun With Bullet Points

What does it say about our company that I was let off from work 4 1/2 hours early on Black Friday? Why were customers not shopping at our store the way they were shopping everywhere else in town?

• For one thing, there was no Big Must Have for this holiday season. No coveted Playstation 4, or whatever Tickle-Me-Elmo fad of the year would have people stampeding through ours or anybody else's doors. But other places were doing remarkably well all the same. Just not us.

• We didn't offer anything really worthwhile for shoppers this time around. Items like electronics, which are usually high on shopper's lists for discounts and sales, were passed over in favor of select DVD television box sets on sale, but with our regular prices higher than anywhere else in town it's hardly a bargain. And $7.99 CDs that are originally priced at $9.99? And only certain ones, at that.

• Nobody is thinking like a Black Friday customer thinks. People plan their excursions, often based on the most highly coveted or biggest sale item on their list as top priority, and then everything else comes after. If a limited number of iPods are on sale at Walmart, then people will make a plan to scramble for those iPods, then when they have been acquired at last, other items on their lists like CDs and DVDs come next. And since they are already at Walmart -- a loss leader store that can afford to sell their CDs/DVDs cheap, why go back out into traffic and race across town to my store when everything they want is already right there?

• People want the best bargains in town with as few stops as possible. If it can all be under one roof, I guarantee folks will be pleased as punch. In the past when we had sales on iPods and MP3 players people were lined up outside the store. But our company didn't make any kind of deal with iPod or any other competitive MP3 player this year. Not even last year. And if memory serves me, not even the year before.

Ultimately, we were not competitive at all this season. Maybe there's more to it than what I see, but it's almost as if they didn't really try.

Why did we do so terribly this Black Friday, as badly as we wanted to be successful? Because frankly, we just didn't want it bad enough.