Psst! Wanna know a badly kept secret? With Black Friday approaching like an good-old-zombies-in-the-mall movie, several Internet sites have gotten into the business of spoiling retailers' secrets by leaking what products are going to be on sale.
And some of those big-box retailers haven't loved letting the world know their plans. Last week, Frank Barnako reports, some of the Black Friday sites received threatening letters from lawyers representing Best Buy, insisting they remove their tips from the Web. (Best Buy insisted its sale prices were copyright-protected.)
Now we're seeing an "if-you-can't-beat-them-join-them" strategy.
Best Buy and Wal-Mart are blowing their own embargoes. If you go to Best Buy.com and type in your zip code, you can see the whole Thanksgiving Day newspaper ads that will announce what bargains can be had.
Wal-Mart, too, is using its Web site to announce the "unbelievable in-store values" that will be available between 5 and 11 am. the day after Thanksgiving.
These Black Friday sites seem to be busy little places. The Black Friday site at GottaDeal.com, for instance, boasts of 110,000 members who hang around and chat about such deals as BestBuy.com's upcoming unadvertised specials -- a $249 Toshiba laptop and a $999 plasma HDTV.
FatWallet, Black Friday.info, Black Friday Ads and The Black Friday are more look-alike sites dedicated to day-after-Thanksgiving deals. These are some plain spaces, but they get the job done.
Black Friday has come to mark the official start of the Christmas shopping season. (Ok, Hannukah, too) The term refers to the time of year when retailers typically went from the unprofitable red ink to the profitable black ink.
Let's say you don't want to spend Friday sweating with the masses? You might want to check out this site. Someone might even be live-blogging of Black Friday. I'll be raking leaves.
