Black Friday leftovers: Elk City
I ran across this excellent video of the Black Friday rush into the Elk City Wal-mart store put together by someone identified only as OKElks. Notice the music, the graphics and the slo-mo replay. This guy was good!
Jim Stafford
Special Correspondent
Black Friday Frenzy
Rise and shine … it’s 3:00 a.m. Days of planning and strategizing all come down to this.
First stop – Walmart. I’ve never done Walmart on Black Friday before. What makes it different: The lines are inside versus the usual wait-outside-in-the-cold-and-dark lines. You would think that if people got there early enough, they would grab what they wanted and check out at 5 a.m. (the official start to the sale). But everything in the ad is roped off, on palettes, guarded by Walmart associates. They took the ropes down about 10 minutes early and the frenzy started. People were grabbing, pushing, trampling innocent bystanders. Just for a discounted memory card.
Top items on my list: a flash video device and digital photo frame. 50% off. Couldn’t pass it up. Downside: The photo department is one of the only places where you have to pay for it right there, so the line moved incredibly slow. I finally made my way out of the store around 5:30. By 5:30, it looked as if a tornado blew through the “main action aisles” (as the associates called them.)
Next stop: Toys R Us. Here, it is best to get in line first, then shop. The line snakes up and down the aisles, from the back of the store to the front. About an hour in line altogether. Just enough time to shop while you wait because they strategically placed all the sale items along the line’s route. Plus, you can easily make friends and swap watching-each-other’s-place duties.
Third stop: Best Buy. This by far had the longest pre-dawn line, but by 6:30, the store had half-emptied out. The line wasn’t bad and associates had the store pretty organized and actually made themselves available to help customers.
Last stop: Quail Springs Mall. Three hours of browsing the “doorbusters” and we were done with our day. When we left, the lines were still extremely long at JCPenney and Macy’s. Other than the department stores, the mall wasn’t too bad. Not overly crowded.
8 1/2 hours later, after the pushing, shoving, shouting, grabbing and spending we made it home, in one piece.
-Erica Smith, Copy Editor
Be Kind
I got to the mall AFTER the sun rose today, so I probably missed out on most of the longest lines.
But I heard horror stories from other shoppers. One was so glad to wait only 20 minutes or so to check out at Sears, he was practically giddy.
But other shoppers had a case of the Christmas grumpies — and made it known they were not pleased with any wait, and especially one that involved a price check.
Here’s a tip folks: The stores are going to be crowded on Black Friday. Everyone wants a bargain, but all that savings comes with a price — your patience. And yelling at the clerk who has stood there bleary-eyed since 4 a.m. isn’t going to speed things along.
Instead, tell her thanks for her hard work today.
I’m sure she’d rather be shopping.
Susan Simpson, Staff Writer
Black Friday: The Running of the Bulls
I’m not sure there was any bigger 5 a.m. Black Friday bull rush into a retail store than what I witnessed at the Elk City Wal-Mart.
This was the fifth year that I began my Black Friday in the dark outside the Wal-Mart in Elk City because my mother-in-law lives on a farm about 15-miles north of town.
This year, two lines already snaked far into the parking lot as I rolled up at 4:40 a.m. I shot a few photos and then positioned myself to video the run into the store when the doors. I filmed 45 seconds of it, and the uninterrupted rush of people into the store continued for another minute or two.I went inside and found the place already in gridlock.
Shoppers — mostly women — grabbed shopping carts and tried to crowd two or three abreast down the narrow aisles. Traffic stopped flowing about five minutes after the store opened.
As in past years it seemed that most were drawn to cheap electronics, with flat-screen televisions and computers the hot items. But so were toys, video games, movies and even clothing.
I saw women pushing carts piled high with all of this stuff, and I wondered how they had time to even find it and scoop it up.I had my eye on a cheap HP printer that my mother-in-law asked me to buy for her, but when I tried to get back to the electronics area I saw that it would be a near-impossible task, at least for a few minutes.
So, I stationed myself near the jewelry counter and waited for some break in the gridlocked aisles. Finally, about 5:45 –45 minutes after the door opened — I saw a route to the printers. It required circling around to the back of the store and coming in from the opposite direction.
I got my printer and headed to the checkout stand, which was its own story. The lines were already 10 deep, and cashiers were ringing up $300-$400 at a time. Two women at the register across from me bought about 100 cheap videos — wonder if they own a video store — along with enough other stuff to rack up a $454 bill.
The guy in line ahead of me looked around and said: “does this look like a recession to you?”
I finally got checked out and left the store with my prize. As President Bush might say, “mission accomplished.”
Special Correspondent
When is a “bank” not a bank?
One of the challenges for Roger Beverage, president of the Oklahoma Bankers Association, is to explain how Oklahoma banks are doing better than their counterparts in other states. One of the things that makes his job more difficult, he says, is that the media has regularly referred to large investment banks like Morgan Stanley and Bear Stearns as “banks.” Those huge — and shaky – institutions don’t have much to do with the local community bank where you keep your checking account and your car loan, Beverage says.
“The difference between what real banks do and what these other people that are called “banks” did is banks ask the question: Can you and will you pay this money back if I lend it to you?” Beverage said.
Don Mecoy
Business Writer
Who saw the meltdown coming? Peter Schiff
Watch as pundit after pundit scoffs at Euro Pacific Capital president Peter Schiff’s accurate predictions in 2006 and 2007 about the economic meltdown and its causes. it’s a remarkable compilation, and a remarkable performance by Schiff, who pretty much hit the nail on the head time after time.
Business Writer
IRS issues numbers galore
As you might imagine, the federal agency charged with collecting taxes, tracking taxpayers and enforcing tax laws tends to produce a tremendous amount of paperwork. If you like data, the Internal Revenue Service’s “Statistics of Income” (pdf document) contains a flood of them.
Such as
U.S. personal wealth in 2004: In 2004, an estimated 2.7 million adults with gross assets of $1.5 million or more owned nearly $11.1 trillion in assets. With a combined net worth of more than $10.2 trillion, where net worth is defined as gross asset value less debts and mortgages, these top wealth holders made up only about 1.2 percent of the total U.S. adult population, although they held 20.3 percent of the total U.S. net worth in 2004.
and
Information returns filed by tax-exempt organizations: Nonprofit charitable organizations exempt from income tax filed more than 286,000 information returns for tax year 2005, an increase of 4 percent from tax year 2004. These organizations held more than $2.2 trillion in assets, an increase of 9 percent from the previous tax year. Information returns for tax year 2005 were filed with the IRS in calendar years 2006 and 2007.
and
Growth in the number of partnerships and total partnership net income between 2005 and 2006: The number of partnerships increased 6.6 percent, from more than 2.7 million in tax year 2005 to more than 2.9 million in tax year 2006. Total partnership net income (loss) increased by 22.1 percent between the two years, from $546.2 billion to $666.7 billion.
Don Mecoy
Business Writer
The meaning of thrift
A thrift initiative has created a quiz to gauge what thrift means to people. Among the questions (all to be answered in five words or less):
Thrift is ________
The opposite of thrift is ___________
Best all-time thrift movie ____________
Best all-time anti-thrift movie ___________
All-time most admirable U.S. millionaire ____________
All-time most destructive anti-thrify U.S. institution ____________
Most valuable current pro-thrift idea ____________
The author’s answers can be seen here. But answer at least a few of the questions before clicking through. The author and I agreed on the best all-time thrift movie and most notorious U.S. anti-thrift millioniare.
Don Mecoy
Business Writer
YouTube goes wide
If that YouTube video of a guy getting hit in the crotch by the 2×4 looks different today, that’s because it is.
YouTube tweaked their display on Monday, expanding their videos to 960 pixels and giving them a widescreen look.
Videos that aren’t in the 16:9 aspect ratio will be hit with black bars on the side. That includes most videos at this point.
But what is YouTube driving at?
The site is getting ready for some of its legit partnerships with real entertainment companies to blossom. Up soon are full-length movies from MGM.
YouTube is playing catchup with Hulu, the competitor launched by NBC and Fox last year to keep their copyrighted videos (ie “Family Guy” and “Saturday Night Live”) out of the clutches of YouTubers.
Hulu’s speed to market with some great product - I watched all four hours of “Lawrence of Arabia” on the site last week and regularly use it for episodes of “House” – left YouTube looking flat-footed and appealing to the teens-with-webcams set.
If they can clean house a little bit – and changing the look and of the player can add a lot to that – then YouTube can become yet another legit distribution channel for media companies.
Mike Koehler
Multimedia Editor
Ominous data
Buried eight paragraphs deep in a feature about the bankruptcy of retailer Mervyn’s in Monday’s Wall Street Journal is this disquieting passage:
Forty private-equity-owned companies have sought bankruptcy-court protection this year, according to data compiled by Thomson Reuters. And of the 86 Standard & Poor’s-rated companies that have defaulted on their debt this year, 53 were involved in private-equity transactions, according to S&P.
S&P expects the default rate to increase sharply over the next year, probably leading to more private-equity-backed companies filing for bankruptcy protection. Creditors, employment lawyers and bankruptcy are expected to step up legal scrutiny of those buyout transactions, which typically involved large amounts of borrowed money.
And the mess continues to unravel…
Don Mecoy
Business News
