‘How do you convince them to keep buying?’
Black Friday is indeed upon us.
Watch for in-store and online discounts on popular merchandise well ahead of Nov. 24, traditionally the year’s biggest shopping day, and the start to the season when retailers do about 40 per cent of their annual business.
For Best Buy Canada, this year’s Black Friday began Nov. 8, with discounts on hundreds of items. Walmart followed a day later.
Beating both of those retailers to the punch was Amazon.com, which launched its “Countdown to Black Friday” on Nov. 1, offering discounts on selected items each day. Amazon’s scheme is to discount different items each day, to encourage bargain-hunters to visit every day, or better yet, to check in several times a day.
Black Friday, the day after U.S. Thanksgiving, will remain the focus of heaviest discounting.
But merchants are now intruding on the sanctity of the U.S. Thanksgiving itself, with stores such as Wal-Mart, Best Buy, Toys R Us, Target Corp., J.C. Penney, Kohl’s and other large merchants opening for business on Thanksgiving Day at 3 p.m. or 6 p.m. to get a jump on Black Friday.
The obvious potential downside for retailers in fast-forwarding Black Friday and the following Cyber Monday — the traditional start of the holiday online selling season — is that many shoppers will have completed their Christmas lists before those dates show up on the calendar.
The buyer of a discounted bigticket item like the $1,300 Samsung TVs at Wal-Mart isn’t going to buy another one later in November or in December.
“If everything is already 40 per cent off, it’s going to take a lot more to get shoppers excited about Thanksgiving, Black Friday and Cyber Monday,” U.S. retail analyst Sarah Engel of Dynamic Action told Bloomberg. “How do you convince them to keep buying?”
Waiting for Saudi Aramco IPO
You might want to curb your enthusiasm over the upcoming planned IPO for Saudi Aramco, expected to raise a colossal $100 billion (U.S.) for the world’s biggest oil-production company.
Have a look back at this year’s disastrous IPOs for Roots Corp. and Snap Inc.
Roots shares infamously plunged 16 per cent on their first day of trading, Oct. 25. They continue to languish at $9.50. Recall that Roots originally intended to price its stock in the $14 to $16 range, before settling on $12 to raise $200 million.
Lesson: Be extra cautious about IPOs whose pricing is in flux during the prospectus stage.
Shares in Snapchat owner Snap Inc. proved irresistible to institutional investors seeking another Facebook-like win with millennial users. Snap’s Wall Street underwriters, led by Morgan Stanley, dismissed as a blip Snap’s pre-IPO reports of declining rates of user growth.
But the warning was no blip. In its latest quarter, Snap’s user growth was an anemic 2.9 per cent, compared with the 17 per cent mid-2016 that enticed investors who rushed to get early allotments of Snap shares. Those shares now trade at more than 25 per cent below the IPO price.
Lesson: Take to heart signs of weakness disclosed before the IPO, no matter what management or the IPO’s hired salespeople say.
As for Aramco, the recent unprecedented turmoil in the House of Saud alone is dissuasive. Then there’s Riyadh’s feckless (and costly) war with Yemen and troubling disputes with Qatar and Lebanon.
Count on the underwriters to focus on what they’ll describe as the strong fundamentals for oil and gas, citing “externalities” like war and Riyadh palace intrigue as inconsequential. And count on them to be wrong about that.
Peyton Place on the Thames
The melodrama that is The Brexit Story will continue to rival House of Cards in its ability to surprise and unsettle viewers.
In previous instalments, Theresa May blundered in calling an ill-fated June snap election, which cost her Tories their parliamentary majority.
Hanging on to power by just a handful of seats offered by a hitherto unknown Northern Ireland party, May then suffered to have her views on how the 2019 separation of Britain from the European Union should play out contradicted by Boris Johnson, May’s foreign minister and subordinate (ostensibly).
Johnson set off an epidemic of policy freelancing in May’s caucus. More recently, the ghost of Joe Clark visited the October U.K. Tory party conference, where the knives were out for May. The besieged PM managed to thwart the plots against her leadership, but then faced a widening sexual-harassment scandal in the Commons that forced the ouster of her defence secretary, Michael Fallon.
That scandal, which imperils May’s slender hold on sufficient seats to form a government, continues with investigations of allegations of similar inappropriate behaviour by, among others, May’s own deputy, Damien Green.
In the latest instalment, May last week sent her international development minister, Priti Patel, to the knackers, it being revealed that Patel had taken 12 secret meetings with Israeli officials during a supposed vacation in the Levant in August, without informing May or the Foreign Office.
A future instalment might see another U.K. general election during negotiations with the EU on the terms of their divorce.
May’s government has been described as “lurching” (that is, from crisis to crisis) for three months now.
The bargaining position of Britain is clear as mud. And EU negotiators are becoming less frustrated with the more unrealistic demands of May’s government than with doubt over with whom in Britain they’ll end up negotiating.