Target reveals Black Friday strategy

Shoppers who spend $75 on Black Friday (not on Thanksgiving) will get a 20 percent off coupon good for purchases made December 4-13.

As part of the “10 Days of Deals”, customers (or “guests”, as Target prefers to call them) will have access to a “Black Friday presale” on the preceding Wednesday (25 November). Other retailers have also been opening earlier and earlier to stay competitive and keep up with the Black Friday madness – JCPenney will open at 3pm on Thanksgiving Day this year. The Boycott Black Thursday Facebook group has more than 139,000 likes and uses #KeepFamilyFirst. Money cites the “point of diminishing returns”, at which stores recognize a limit on how much excitement they can really drum up over heavily-discounted electronics.

So far, most of the best finds are Black Friday tech deals, a trend that looks to continue this holiday season.

You can count on a lot of Black Friday 2015 deals online this year, especially on Thanksgiving Day and Black Friday proper.

“For at least the last five years, everything in the ads was also online at Kohls and Target, so why fight the rush?” she tells The Christian Science Monitor.

With Christmas only a few weeks away, big box retailers are already releasing previews of their holiday sales.

The Fortune report also pointed out that “the early openings yielded mixed results for many stores” in previous years, that “in many cases, the move simply shifted the timing of sales rather than enlarging the Thanksgiving retail pie altogether”, and that a recent survey found that “only a small minority (12%) of shoppers even want to go to stores on Thanksgiving”.

Target isn’t the only one gearing up for a bumper holiday season, with Walmart starting its holiday sales the day after Halloween.

“I can walk around on Black Friday and know everything I had to have is headed to my house”, she says.