In an increasingly popular trend, sale ads for retail's busiest day of the year have been leaked to consumers like Dougherty through a variety of Web sources ahead of the scheduled release date, not always to the liking of retailers.
Two popular sites for leaks, blackfridayads.com and blackfriday.gottadeal.com, get millions of visitors to their websites during the week leading up to Black Friday.
Brad Olson, owner of gottadeal.com, said his company provides a vital service to shoppers.
"We allow them to plan their strategy for Black Friday and holiday shopping by giving them weeks of advance notice of the ads, instead of having to wait until the day before to find out what is on sale," Olson said. "This lets them do research, compare prices and ultimately get the best deals."
Both websites publish ads obtained from various sources, some anonymous. Very few come directly from retailers because some merchants are less than pleased with the idea of their ads' being released early.
In fact, this year, lawyers for Walmart and Home Depot sent letters to gottadeal.com and similar websites threatening legal action if their ads are posted before permission is given.
Jean Niemi, a spokeswoman for Home Depot, said this practice is confusing.
"There are many versions of our Black Friday ad, each catered to a particular region based on market pricing and product availability," she said. "If a website posts the wrong ad, consumers are likely to be angry if they show up at our stores looking for a product that isn't offered in that store."
But a representative from Lowe's, Colleen Carbott, said her company welcomes the leaks.
"We understand our customers' excitement and their desire to know what the sales will be as early as possible, so we tend to send our ads to popular websites like blackfridayads.com because they have large readership and that gives us the potential to reach more customers," Carbott said. "We've been doing it this way for nearly five years now, and it seems to work well."
So what should merchants expect on Black Friday this year? Retail analysis from comScore. com indicates that shoppers might be doing the bulk of their holiday shopping online. The company found that in-store sales on Black Friday rose only 0.5 percent in 2009 to $10.66 billion from the year before, while online sales increased 11 percent to $595 million.
Market analyst Coremetrics reported that online shoppers spent 35 percent more on Black Friday Web purchases in 2009 than a year earlier.
