The Millionaire Next Door

Black Friday Blues

Are you feeling blue, even guilty or left out?  You did not participate in the Black Friday madness.  Perhaps you didn’t even take advantage of all those opportunities available on Cyber Monday. . . .  Alternatively, you indeed might have been lucky and perhaps smart as well to have avoided following the crowd of more than 100,000,000 Americans who were stampeding in and out of stores and cyberspace.  In a recent New York Times article, the research by a University of Washington professor revealed the truth about Black Friday.


It’s not until early December . . . that prices are likely to be lowest for electronics, products that are among the biggest sellers on the Friday after Thanksgiving.


There were five or six tents pitched in front of my local Best Buy for two days, occupied by Black Friday zealots.  If these zealots had read this research,  would they still think that that flat-screen TV was such a bargain?  According to the UW professor:


. . . Black Friday is for retailers to go from the red into the black.  It’s not really for people to get great deals on most popular products.


The article further stated that:


In the case of toys stores actually offer the steepest discounts in the weeks immediately following Thanksgiving. . . .


So where does the millionaire next door fit into all of this?   Two days camping out in line, that’s 48 hours or nearly 5  times the number of hours a millionaire next door allocates per month to planning and managing his investments. The correlation is simple.  The less you shop the less you spend.  Never regret missing out on a so-called “sale.” 

4 thoughts on “Black Friday Blues”

  1. I shopped and got some bargains at the Black Friday sales. I didn’t have to spend days of wasted time camping out. Me and my frugal spouse showed up two hours early and got everything we wanted.

  2. The 53 Percent Millionaire

    I saw a headline about people camped out at Best Buy for a week. It can’t help but wonder if there’s a very high correlation between the individuals camped out at Best Buy, and those camped out with the “Occupy” groups around the US…protesting that they are “being taken advantage of by the rich” who instead bought stock in Best Buy. Afterall, it’s only fair thos ‘evil rich pay off their bargains put on a credit card as well as their student loans’ which were obviously a smart investment since they’d rather camp out to buy junk than work for a week. The violence exhibited by many of the BF shoppers reflects poor judgement and lack of self control that in my experience usually accompany the “victims” in our economy.

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