Black Friday: The path to profit

Jamar Cobb-Dennard Black Friday, Small Business Saturday and Cyber Monday are one path to annual profit for small business owners. Yet, many business-to-consumer companies (and perhaps business-to-business companies, too) are unprepared to maximize the Thanksgiving holiday weekend. Retail and consumer businesses are hard to make profitable. High inventory costs, low margins and tough competition create a perfect storm that sucks away profit before the business owner sees it. In many consumer businesses, they do not recognize profit until the hopeful onslaught of customers purchase for the holiday season. In the 1960s, the Black Friday moniker was given to the day after Thanksgiving by Philadelphia police as they dealt with throngs of shoppers. The name and concept of a big holiday shopping day became popular in the 1980s. As a child of the 80s, I remember the growth of Black Friday. Lines that wrapped around stores. Shoppers who camped out in order to the first to get limited quantities of sale items. Hordes of people running over each other and fighting over popular products. Black Friday became a holiday within itself. Due to online shopping, the intensity of Black Friday in-store shopping has died down. However, the opportunity to make big...