The leftover stock may be more prevalent this year due to the economic difficulties of 2008, so more stores may be placing more product on this type of a deep discount.

The up side is that you can purchase items that you thought or hoped you were getting for Christmas but didn’t. Also, you have the opportunity to quickly use those gift cards you got and save money at the same time. The down side is that the discounted items are generally products that no one bought during the holiday season, much like perusing the clearance section of a store.

Yahoo! Finance has published an article about the post-Christmas sales this year. The article reports that the following stores will be having some sort of post-Christmas sale this week: Neiman Marcus, Circuit City, Toys’R'Us, KB Toys, Target, Wal-Mart, Barnes and Noble, J.C. Penney, Home Depot, Bath and Body Works, and Kohl’s.

From this action, we can presume that:

• Wal-Mart believes that competitors will alter their Black Friday sales based on the content of leaked Wal-Mart sales.
• Wal-Mart believes that competitors can only obtain the leaked information from a Black Friday website.
• Wal-Mart does not appreciate diligent Black Friday shoppers who seek out ads early.

And really, why should Wal-Mart appreciate the diligent shopper? The business of Black Friday is based on a few basic principles, but the two greatest ones are these:

1. Many shoppers will buy more than just the best bargains while shopping on Black Friday.
2. Many shoppers will never send in their rebates on rebated items.

Since diligent Black Friday shoppers scope out only the best deals, rarely buy much else, and send in all the rebates, we don’t fall into their moneymaking traps. And that’s exactly the way we like it.

I declare a boycott on Wal-Mart this Black Friday. This doesn’t affect Wal-Mart much: Any such boycott will not affect Wal-Mart in any substantial way because most of the uninformed Black Friday shoppers head to Wal-Mart or Target. (I should note that many informed BF shoppers head to these stores as well, but only when it’s in their best interests.) I’m declaring this boycott mostly out of convenience because it really doesn’t affect me much. As a personal rule, I refuse to head to Wal-Mart or Best Buy on the morning of Black Friday for other reasons. Since I have mentioned Best Buy, it should be noted that they have been quoted as saying they will not bother with tracking down Black Friday ad sites to have their ads removed.

Objectively, this cease and desist order is simply a nuisance and not much else. In 2006, the Wal-Mart ad was leaked 15 days before Black Friday and now we’ll have to wait 12 extra days or so to see it. This simply means less organized planning time for those expecting to head to Wal-Mart on Black Friday.