Black Friday on the Net

Dateline: Pocatello, ID

I've always associated the term "Black Friday," with the stock market crash. I have only come to realize lately that the term is also now associated with the big shopping day on the Friday after Thanksgiving. My first reaction was that the term was also negative as it applies to this day, as I view it as one where I do not go near a retail store. But, in fact, I believe the term comes to mean the day when many retailers go from being in the red to showing a positive cash flow.

Whatever the case, Black Friday this year became a negative term for some retailers who ply their wares on the Internet. Why? Because so many more people have decided to use the Internet to do their holiday shopping rather than brave the hordes of people at the mall...something I have been doing for years ( I am such a trend setter).

For instance, the WalMart web site was nearly impossible to access yesterday. For much of Friday morning, attempts to open Walmart.com resulted blank pages, delays or other problems. By early afternoon, visitors were simply told to come back later. According to WalMart, they had far more website traffic than they had anticipated. By late Friday afternoon, things had pretty much returned to normal for them.

A company called Keynote, which regularly monitors performance at leading Web sites, said its probes began detecting problems at about 4:30 a.m. EST. Throughout the morning, visitors still could access portions of the site but generally ran into difficulty before completing purchases. For instance, searches that normally take a second or two were taking 30 or 40 seconds and attempts to log in or pay for purchases sometimes generated error messages.

Meanwhile, Amazon.com had its own problems, although they did not last nearly as long as WalMart's. The site was disrupted for about 15 minutes, starting at about 2 p.m. EST Thursday, as the retailer was offering the Xbox 360 to the first 1,000 customers for $100, $200 below the regular retail price. The Xbox sold out in 29 seconds. Amazon also sold out of discounted Mongoose mountain bikes, Barbie dolls and Amazon Prime memberships with $100 gift certificates in about 15 minutes. Amazon.com also said they underestimated web traffic.

Another web traffic jam occurred at Disney's web site. They had some one-day sales that attracted lots of people. According to Disney, one could get on the web site easily enough, but could not get past the first couple of pages before being bogged down. Disney is planning to extend their special sales through Sunday night and expect customers to come back.

If you are a web shopper like me, expect the Monday after Thanksgiving, also known as "Cyber Monday," to be busy as it is one of the year's biggest online holiday shopping days, as people return to work and shop online using their office computers.

FYI: Susan and I went to the mall here in Pocatello around 5:00 PM to get a few groceries and for Susan to shop at a couple of stores that we don't have in our own neck of the woods. It looked like any other Friday ...no crowds at all, even at WalMart.