Wal-Mart Gives Black Friday Sale Big Push

Vittorio Hernandez

U.S. retailers are gearing for the Black Friday sale in a bid to make up for weak sales for the whole year.

Wal-Mart gave the Black Friday sale a big push by publishing an online ad on Facebook and its website, Walmart.com, of its three Black Friday events.

Duncan Mac Naughton, Wal-Mart chief merchandizing officer for the United States, said the sale will begin as early as Thanksgiving Day because customers told the retailer they would rather stay up late the night before than wake up early the next day.

By 10 p.m. of Thursday, toys, home items and apparel would begin to go on sales. By midnight, electronic items and general merchandise will have marked down prices until 8 a.m. through the weekend.

Among the good buys for the Friday night sale are an Xbox 360 4GB model with Kinect which would be sold for $199.96, and which includes a $50 gift certificate.

Best Buy will open by Thursday midnight and offer lower-priced electronic items.

Target, which suffered a website crash a few weeks ago, needs to fix its online portal in order to take advantage of the deluge of orders, experts said.

Target's website had crashed six times since it went live on Aug. 23. Analysts warned the second-largest discount retailer in the U.S. that it stands to lose customers if the store's website would suffer another crash.

The retailer used to outsource its online operations to Amazon since 2001, but decided to bring the service in-house to improve shopper experience. Of Target's $70 billion annual sales, only 2 percent is from online.

However, more consumers are shifting to online shopping. The National Retail Federation estimated this year 82 percent of consumers would so some holiday shopping online although 90 percent of them still purchase from bricks-and-mortar stores.

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