By Paula Rosenblum, Managing Partner
December 1, 2009
If you’re a retailer doing business in the US, you know the name “Aventura.” It’s a city just north of Miami, but it’s also the name of a mall. Wikipedia reports Aventura Mall as the 5th largest in the country. The Mall has six or seven anchor stores (depending on whether or not you count Macy’s Home Furnishings) and is surrounded for several miles to the north and south by strip centers housing the likes of Best Buy, Target (2), Old Navy, Bed, Bath and Beyond, Barnes and Noble; you get the picture. Aventura is a shopping Mecca.
Mother Nature conspired to make Black Friday a perfect South Florida shopping day. The temperature dropped steadily during Thanksgiving Day, and by midnight, it was about 60 degrees F (15 C) - perfect for waiting around outside for stores to open. All day Friday the temperature hovered at around 65-70 (18-19 C), with bright sunny skies, making it a bit too cold for our snowbirds to hit the beach but a perfect day to wait in lines or shop.
Friday at around 1PM, once I thought the crowds might have thinned, I headed off to track the action. The short story: hordes of people in the mall, an impenetrable Best Buy, shopping bags everywhere, unbelievable traffic…busy, busy, busy. I want a new camera so made an attempt to land at Best Buy. We couldn’t find a place to park. Camera purchase postponed for another day. Instead, we spent an hour looking for parking at the mall. Every time we thought someone was getting ready to leave their parking space, we discovered they were just putting bags in their trunk and heading back in for more. We finally found a parking space and headed inside. Mall personnel told me traffic had been steady since 5 am when the mall opened, with only a brief break at early lunchtime. My waitress at Johnny Rocket also tipped me off to two other places where traffic was beyond comprehension (and where I did not go): Sawgrass Mills Outlet Mall, and BrandsMart, a “value-priced” consumer electronics retailer.
At BrandsMart, the lines began forming in the early evening, and by morning, cars snaked out onto the highway waiting to get into the store. The Miami Herald reported a stunning rush of humanity into Sawgrass from the opening bell. Everyone is looking for a bargain this year.
Retailers have consistently reported Promotions Management as a key arrow in holiday technology arsenals, and I could certainly see it in evidence. Everyone from Zara to Urban Outfitters was running some kind of special holiday sale.
We went to a movie to pass some time and headed home at around 4:30. In previous years, by 4 PM, the streets have been empty, and the shopping herds thinned. Not this year. Getting home from Aventura was as arduous a journey as was getting there. I don’t know what the numbers will look like, but traffic-wise, it sure looked powerful – easily as busy as I’ve seen it since 2006.
Mobility Mash-Up
Now that we’ve got Black Friday out of the way, let’s roll back a day to Thanksgiving and spend a few minutes talking about RSR’s favorite new channel – the smart phone.
Back in February, as we continued whining about lack of retailer smart phone initiatives, Craig Stevenson from IBM told us he was suddenly seeing a lot of requests for mobility pilots. Since that time, we’ve started hearing about a steady stream of applications, at least designed for the iPhone. I wondered, “Dude…what about my Blackberry?”
I was not to be disappointed. Mobile Marketer Daily started off my Thanksgiving Day tipping me off to JC Penney’s new holiday-themed WAP site. I spent a good part of my day playing with it. What a cool little application! Yes, you can sign up for mobile alerts, but you can also look at JCP’s edited gift assortment, and save it as a hint, or send it as a hint to friends and family. You can’t buy it right there, but it’s for the gift receiver, not the giver. It was a nicely edited assortment, and the application quite easy to use. Probably most importantly, the images looked really good on the limited real estate of my Blackberry Curve.
Bottom Line
I know Miami’s an anomaly this time of year. We’re loaded with guests, and with weather like this, even in a bad economy it’s hard to feel miserable. And we have a very long way to go until the closing Holiday bells. However, it seems as though a fog is lifting, and people are feeling better. We’re all too smart to take Black Friday top line numbers and extrapolate to a full holiday season. But so far, the weather’s looking good.
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