KB Toys and Big Lots blocking online Black Friday Ads
BlackFridayInfo.com is a well-known website that posts proposed and many times accurate lists of sales for the upcoming Black Friday (The day after Thanksgiving in the US) Sales menagerie. It’s been mentioned and received coverage by all the major news & Internet media.
Two well known, Big Lots and KB Toys, albeit not the stores that you’d plan on going at 5am on BF anyways, sent a cease & desist notice to the manager of the website claiming “Copyright Violations” and forced the removal of their posted sales.
See Black Friday News for Black Friday 2008
The economy is going to pot, over a million people have lost their jobs, other sites are straining to make their marketing money go farther. Yet these two stores are implying “No, our newspaper ads 4 days before will do just fine.”
In this economy where we’ve seen upto a 30% drop in our 401K’s, people will be cautious and hunting for deals on only the necessities and maybe a fun toy or two. BlackFridayInfo.com (and its competitors) offers one stop searching. Big Lots & KB Toys are no longer on their lists. Do you think the connected shopper will look at Big Lots and KB Toys as an option? I think not.
I don’t blame the lawyers, they probably were directed to send the CnD. I blame the short-sighted, narrow minded, blithering idiot of an exec(s) who think(s) that this is a smart move as the Internet-savvy Marketing people are begging to let them show it.
I’m not going to call for a silly blacklisting of these stores, these execs will cause this all by themselves simply because their stores are not on any of these lists.
The New Big 3
Looks like there are only 3 cell carriers now. AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon
Centennial was purchased by AT&T AT&T buys Centennial for $944 million just now
AllTel was purchase by Verizon last week
Maybe T-Mobile could do something stupid and buy Sprint…