Let friends in your social network know what you are reading aboutTwitterGoogle+LinkedInPinterestPosted!A link has been posted to your Facebook feed. CLOSExEmbedIf you're one of the 137.4 million Americans who are planning on or considering spending at least part of Thanksgiving or the holiday weekend shopping, here's what you need to know.►Related: Get the Thanksgiving newspaper on Wednesday►Analysis: These Black Friday deals can't be beat1. Make a plan: Retailers released digital versions of their ads earlier this month through their store websites — it's all about winning the wallets of shoppers, which means winning their hearts and minds, which means creating excitement. But the easier-to-read print versions of those ads are in the Free Press. Take a look, compare and contrast, plot your course.2. Hatchimals: Walmart, which is advertising difficult-to-find Hatchimals for $48.88, swears it will have a decent number of the hot toy available online and in stores its for its big sale.
starts its sale at 12:01 a.m. Thanksgiving; the in-store sale starts at 6 p.m. Thanksgiving. No need to camp out: The best doorbusters are on Thanksgiving, but, in lots of cases, you no longer have to wait outside for stores to open for a chance to get them. This year, retailers — knowing that Thanksgiving/Black Friday is increasingly becoming an online shopping event — are making it even easier to shop online for doorbusters. Walmart is offering most of its doorbusters online. Target is offering its Black Friday deals online starting sometime during the early morning hours of Thanksgiving — based on past experience, I suspect that means about 3 a.m.; its in-store sale begins at 6 p.m. Thanksgiving. Speaking of online shopping: As with last year, more shoppers are expected to shop online than in stores on Thanksgiving and Black Friday — and for the duration of the season. In fact, according to Accenture, a worldwide consulting company, 50% of shoppers say they will do most of their holiday shopping online, compared with 43% who say they will do it in stores.
Does that mean less in-store competition for coveted items? Maybe.5. Check hours: Some stores are switching up their hours this year, so make sure to check before you head out. Macy's, for example, has two sets of store hours. Some stores are scheduled to be open 5 p.m. Thanksgiving through 10 p.m. Black Friday. Other stores are to open at 5 p.m. Thanksgiving to 2 a.m. Friday and again from 6 a.m Friday to 10 p.m. Friday. Best Buy stores are open 5 p.m. Thursday to 1 a.m. Friday and 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. Friday. It has doorbusters scheduled for both days. Relatively few shoppers — only 21% — are expected to shop on Thanksgiving. And those who leave home to go to stores, don't tend to linger all night. Black Friday is a bigger day for shoppers — 74% of shoppers are expected to shop that day — and those shoppers spend more time in stores than do Thanksgiving Day shoppers.6. Suck it up: It's a super good time to buy a vacuum. Target and Best Buy are both selling Dyson V6 Animal cordless stick vacuums for $299.99 (reg. $499.99);
Carson's has a Shark Navigator vacuum for $99.97 (reg. $230), plus you'll get a free $25 gift card; Macy's has Dyson doorbusters, but it also has a Shark Navigator Light vacuum for $78.99 (reg. $189.99).7. What's on sale: Know that lots of stores are selling these items: televisions, iDevices, small appliances (some with mail-in rebates, which, if you're like most folks, you'll never redeem), Barbie and really, really small diamond stud earrings.8. Same old, same old: If these offerings sound familiar, it's because they're pretty much the same as last year's.The items are classics, no-brainers that will almost always have appeal. But also because stores work so far in advance to secure their doorbusters it's difficult to include the late-breaking trends. “They probably decide that on Dec. 26 for the next year,'' says Ken Nisch, chairman of Southfield-based JGA, a retail design and branding firm. "And maybe even before that. Everything is a planned promotion. They plan, they organize it with the manufacturer, they figure out how to give value perception."
9. Less excitement:Online spending over Thanksgiving/Black Friday has been up the past few years. In-store spending — where the most money still gets spent — has been down. Because stores space out their sales, beginning them Nov. 1 and ending them Jan. 1. Holiday shoppers start earlier in the season. Overall, the National Retail Federation expects retail spending to be up 3.6% for the holiday season. PricewaterhouseCoopers, the consulting firm, expects all holiday-related consumer spending to be up 10% this year. "It's going to be the most positive holiday season since the great recession,'' said Steve Barr, the firm's retail expert.10. The price of skipping out: There's always going to be another sale. .DETROIT FREE PRESSBlack Friday: From boom to bust We went to Walmart for Black Friday — and it was nothing like we expected Walmart’s Black Friday sales are wildly popular — so popular, in fact, that they have led to massive crowds in stores every year, brawls over merchandise, and tragically, the death of a worker in 2008 after he was trampled by shoppers at a Long Island, New York store.
When we visited a Walmart store in Dublin, Georgia, on Thursday at the start of the retailer’s doorbuster sales, we expected to find chaos. Here’s what we saw instead.Black Friday deals have already seeped into Thanksgiving dinner. Now, Wal-Mart is taking the holiday creep one step further. For the first time this season, the world's largest retailer will kick off its Cyber Week deals the day after Thanksgiving—a time typically reserved for in-store door busters. The online sale begins at 12:01 a.m. Eastern on Black Friday, with deals including a Samsung 60-inch HD smart TV for more than $1,000 off. 's product offering from 8 million items to more than 23 million this year. plans to kick off its online Black Friday sale three hours earlier than last year, at 12:01 a.m. Eastern on Thanksgiving Day. That's hours before its door-buster deals begin in stores, at 6 p.m. that evening. ", said in a news release. The lines between traditional holiday shopping days have gotten more blurred each year, as retailers try to one-up each other to grab a larger share of shoppers' wallets earlier in the season.
Macy's, which had opened its stores at 6 p.m. Thanksgiving Day for the past two years, is moving its Black Friday kickoff an hour earlier this year. The season is also lasting longer, with Target extending its free-shipping window an additional week. The channels are likewise becoming more entwined, as consumers do a larger chunk of their shopping online. Whereas Black Friday deals used to be restricted to a retailer's stores, more are rolling out the option for shoppers to snag those discounts online. Along with Wal-Mart, which is running most of its Black Friday deals online for the second year, Kohl's Black Friday door busters will be available on its website for the first time. An estimated 137.4 million people plan to shop over the holiday weekend, according to the National Retail Federation. Yet even as Thanksgiving and Black Friday are expected to rake in more digital dollars this year, Cyber Monday is once again seen being the largest sales day of the year, at$3.36 billion, according to Adobe Digital Insights.