Black Friday Shopping -- In April?
By Ian Bush
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) - There are over 250 days to go until Christmas -- and apparently some retailers think spring isn't too early to have a Black Friday sale.
It's the perfect weekend to rid your property of remnants of the wicked winter -- so says Lowe's, Home Depot and Walmart, which are using 'Black Friday' in their marketing:
"What it tells consumers is, 'hey, we're having a sale, and the prices are going to be like Black Friday'," explains Brent Shelton with the deals site FatWallet.com. "The consumer is going to make the decision whether the prices are good or not."
Shelton says many of the discounts appear worthy of the name:
"Most of the items that we're seeing are outdoor, home and garden, home improvement. Lowes has a really good sale on paint. Sherwin-Williams actually has 40 percent off this weekend."
But is there a risk of watering down the impact of the traditional shopper's holiday -- for us, and for the stores that count on that after-Thanksgiving period to push them into the black?
"To me, somebody that studies shopping trends throughout the U.S. -- it makes sense to do it in the spring," says Shelton. "These are totally different items than we'd see on sale on actual Black Friday and leading up to the holidays."
