A saleswoman holds an Apple iPhone 3G at a shopping mall in Buenos Aires in 2008. Smartphones allow customers to get the best deals from Black Friday 2009 ads in new and powerful ways.
Using Black Friday ads to get the best deals could be grueling. If your best sales intelligence came from printed retail circulars, it meant organizing and comparing long lists. If you used an online deals aggregator, you still didn't have a good way of transporting that knowledge to the store without putting it on paper.
Enter the smartphone — and retailer's rush to connect with customers through the device.
"In the past, what [retailers have] relied on is people to open up the paper and then go in and get the coupons for those doorbusters and everything else," says Kevin Kahn, CFO of TGIBlackFriday.com. "Now people can look at it on their phone and online weeks in advance…. It's a game-changer."
With consumers snapping up iPhones, new Motorola Droids, and tried-and-true Blackberrys, 2009 will be the first Black Friday where the smartphone will have a strong influence, Black Friday watchers agree. Mobile shopping's influence is sure to grow in years to come.
Sears sees the smartphone as a way to bring the company's online presence together with its physical stores, says company spokesman Tom Aiello.
"Some retailers are really good at online, some are really good at bricks and mortar. What we're trying to do is fuse those together in a unique way and mobile is a growing part of that," he says.
After buying a product from Sears' Sears2Go iPhone application, for example, customers have an iron-clad guarantee: The product will be ready in-store within five minutes or customers receive a Sears gift card. This means even loyal Sears shoppers huddled outside its brick-and-mortar entities on the morning of Black Friday can place purchases to be filled on the other side of the store wall.
"You're actually be able to, before the doors open, get online, place the order," Mr. Aiello says. "You can walk right to the package pickup and get your item and not even have to go to the showroom floor. It's really exciting."
Companies like Toys R Us are making their websites mobile friendly, streamlining the online design and allowing shoppers to check inventory at local stores and make instant purchases.
Over 20 percent of shoppers say they will use a mobile phone as their second choice for online shopping, according to a survey by Convergys, a customer interaction and human-resources consulting firm. While shopping via the Internet at home (92 percent as a first choice) or from the office or at an Internet café or public place (just over 30 percent each as a second choice) is still more popular, mobile shopping still represents a solid chunk of potential sales. And in a year when some estimate that holiday retail sales will fall 1 percent from the 2008 level, retailers can't afford to let any consumers go unaccounted for.
"That's a pretty significant number. A quarter of all of your customers are using smart phones and the technology that it enables — comparison shopping, communication — on a level that hasn't existed in previous years," says Doug Farmer, senior director of program management for Convergys. "If you're a web retailer and your web app is not conducive, not configured in a way that makes it easily navigated on smartphones … it means you lose a lot of sales."
Although retailers are racing to get their websites up to mobile snuff and developers hammer out mobile applications, even some consumers with smartphones regard their mobile devices a bit warily when actually sealing a purchase, using them more for comparison shopping than actual purchasing.
"There is a psychological hurdle still to climb for people not just to comparison shop or find coupons from their phone," says dealnews.com editor-in-chief Dan de Grandpre. The company released an iPhone app that allows users to comb through deals from a wide number of retailers, create shopping lists, and receive a dedicated feed for the latest deals.
For all of their power to upend the way customers decide what products to buy, they might also have an equally disrupting effect on a customer's feelings about the product after the purchase. Up-to-the-minute sales updates can shorten the interval between purchase and buyers remorse. While standing in a long Black Friday checkout line, consumers can go over their purchases one last time to make sure they're really the best deals.
"Most stores have a very liberal return policy – especially if you haven't walked out the door yet," Mr. de Grandpre says. "If you have some buyers remorse and you're still in the parking lot, walk back in."
It was an evening out that college students Leslie Pope and John Wagner will long remember.
Not only did they get what they called lousy service, they got handcuffed and arrested.
All over a $16.35 tip.
They were with a half-dozen friends at the Lehigh Pub in Bethlehem last month, so the establishment tacked what it called a mandatory 18 percent gratuity onto the bill of about $73, according to reports.
Pope and Wagner refused to pay.
"You can't give us terrible, terrible service and expect a tip," said Pope, a 22-year-old Moravian College senior who's a Pottsville native, according to the Lehigh Valley Express-Times.
They had to find their own napkins and cutlery while their waitress caught a smoke, had to ask the bar for soda refills, and had to wait over an hour for salad and wings, they told NBC10.
The pub, which was very busy that night, took the $73, but then called the cops, who treated the matter as a theft.
The menu clearly states, "18 percent gratuity added to check of parties of 6 of more," and a similar message is printed on receipts, a pub employee said this morning.
A court date is scheduled for next month.
What would they do if it happened again? a reporter asked.
"Honestly, probably gonna pay the tip anyway," said Pope, prompting Wagner, 24, a Lehigh University grad student, to laugh.
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The battle continues in Washington over health care reform, as light is shed on possible unethical moves in favor of the drug companies' bottom line – profits. On Monday, a New York Times article, "Drug Makers Raise Prices in Face of Health Care Reform," written by Duff Wilson, opened the eyes of the public and the government to a potentially shady move on the part of the pharmaceutical companies. Yesterday, a handful of Democrats called for a government investigation into this year's name-brand drug price hikes while they continue developing and pushing for health care reform, according to Wilson.
Drug companies and health care reform
On the seventh of November a number of cost-cutting provisions were passed by the House. The intent of these provisions is to cut overall drug spending by about $14 billion a year. The drug companies had agreed to help this effort by giving out rebates to the government and the elderly worth $8 billion a year, with expectations of an $80 billion reduction over ten years. This sounds like a positive effort on behalf of the pharmaceutical industry.
Are drug companies raising prices artificially?
Democrats have asked for an investigation to find out if the drug companies may be increasing prices unnecessarily. Several professors and economic experts have agreed that the drug companies shot up prices over the past year by about 9%, with a focus on name-brand drugs, which account for about 78% of prescription drug spending. Keep in mind that with drug patents, there can be no price competition for generic drugs, leaving the public dependent on expensive, possibly over-priced name-brand drugs. The price increases would completely offset the savings for the first year of health care reform, and potentially skew the entire plan to reduce government spending by cutting costs. Basically, where costs are reduced on one hand, price increases would ultimately increase costs on the other.
Drug companies claim that the price increases are justified. The investigation will hopefully discover if the price hikes are just to keep up profits after legislation is passed, a case of future cost containment.
Is there an alternative to prescription drug medications?
The way prescription drugs work, a dependency is created between the patient and the medication. Drugs generally work by covering up symptoms, and are in many cases very helpful, but they do not address the root of the reason for the illness, and they do not heal. People take prescription drugs for asthma, depression, anxiety,indigestion, high-cholesterol, sometimes taking multiple pills on a daily basis, spending thousands a year, even with health insurance. Although there are certainly circumstances which would make conventional medication necessary, there are also many circumstances where the drugs are not the wisest and most effective solution to the problem. There may be a way to dramatically reduce government spending on health care, that has nothing to do with negotiating with drug companies, but with expanding the public's and the health community's knowledge base of alternative medicines. This is the answer to cut dependency and put health in the hands of the people.
New polls indicate President Obama's approval rating has dropped below 50 percent for the first time.
According to Public Policy Polling, 49 percent of voters approve of Obama's work compared to 46 percent who disapprove.
That mirrors the findings of a Quinnipiac University poll that found 74 percent of American voters "like President Barack Obama as a person, but only 47 percent like most of his policies."
"This is the first time President Obama's approval rating has dropped below 50 (percent) in our polling," said Dean Debnam, President of Public Policy Polling. "It does seem that the health care issue is hurting him some with independents who voted for him last year."
Meanwhile, Public Policy Polling also found that 26 percent of Americans think ACORN stole the election for Obama in 2008. Not surprisingly, 52 percent of Republicans feel that way.
"Most Americans like President Barack Obama and might like to have a beer with him," Peter Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute, said in a news release. "But millions of voters who sided with him last November because they thought he would bring change to Washington aren't crazy about the kind of change he is trying to bring.
"That is especially true of independent voters, many of whom used to be Republicans turned off by the Bush years," Brown added. "They may not yet have returned to their former political home, but many have concluded Obama isn't offering their kind of solutions."
On health care, for example, voters disapprove of Obama by a 53-41 percent margin, the Quinnipiac poll found.
"The President's lower policy approval may be a warning sign for the White House that they need to better align their programs with the views of the American people, or better explain to the American people what they're trying to do," Brown said.
