Being in the retail business - and more importantly, in the retail point-of-sale business - this is the “big week”. Black Friday is the day after Thanksgiving and is generally considered the start of the holiday shopping season. It causes great stress on all those involved in retail IT - myself included.

I’ve read a number of interesting articles in the last few days on the subject. An article on Reuters talks about how Black Friday isn’t really the biggest shopping day of the year, and I would certainly agree. When Christmas falls around a weekend the days leading up to it are much bigger. For example, Christmas is on a Monday this year, which will mean that Saturday December 23rd will be huge. The article also mentions Cyber Monday which is a term that was invented by the National Retail Federation. I always thought the idea of Cyber Monday was stupid and naive. The article seems to agree.

So while Black Friday will likely be the biggest day of the year so far for retailers, it probably will not be the biggest for the entire year. But what it does do is give the IT systems their first big run for the year. It’s a big deal, and something that retailers have been preparing for months for. There’s even an article in the Wall Street Journal (subscription required) on how Best Buy held a “dry run” to prepare for Friday. Going so far as to have employees acting as customers at a location in Dallas. The excercise was designed to ensure employees are ready to serve their shoppers during their door-buster sales - not only on Friday, but throughout the holiday shopping season. Kudos to Best Buy.

So from an IT perspective, I’m prepared. As for the personal shopping perspective, I’m staying as far away as possible. I tried to get in on the “door-buster” sales one year. Waking up at 6:00am (which wasn’t early enough) and going to various stores only to find lines that stretched to the back of the store. No thanks. I haven’t seen any bargain that is worth that much effort. I’m much more likely to stay at home and buy things from Amazon. Amazon Prime can be a wonderful thing come holiday season…

I just finished a webex presentation to the sales and marketing team at Tomax on our current offerings for customer loyalty applications. It became apparent to me in preparing for the presentation that there is a lot of confusion among people anytime the words “customer loyalty” are used. It means many different things to many different people.

So I began to actually reflect on what loyalty patterns I as a consumer actually follow. I assume I am like most people in that my wallet is filled with a number of different “rewards membership” cards to retailers. I often use them, but I don’t think I can really say that my possession of them drives me to favor one place over another.

So a rewards program itself (in my opinion) can’t drive customer loyalty. I’m more often driven to a retailer by prices/discounts — which sometimes require a loyalty card. So what are retailers actually doing? They’re using the loyalty card to track buying patterns. It’s a way to get demographics for who is buying what, where, and when. And while it is not 100% accurate, it is certainly more than they can get normally.

I’ve also noticed more and more that I am using brick and mortar retailers as “hands on test centers” — especially when it comes to electronics. When I bought my camcorder I went to Best Buy and Circuit city to try it out, but I never had the intention to buy it from there. (I think the salespeople knew it too, because they were not helpful.) The reality is that I can find the item on the internet for 20 to 30% cheaper — that’s a lot. And that was from Amazon, not some electronics warehouse place back east (where it would probably be hot…)

So what is it really that drives customers from one place to another? I’ll have to keep researching, but it is becoming more and more obvious that there are many things that play into it.

Over the last 4-6 weeks I have been going back and forth with credit companies in attempts to get several retailers up and running with a credit processing implementation. I have come to the conclusion that it is a wonder anyone can process a credit card. And no wonder merchants have to pay a transaction fee, the cost of all this complication has to be accounted for somewhere — may as well make the merchant pay for it! Sheesh…

There are too many moving parts. And while many moving parts doesn’t necessarily mean something is complicated, it does make the possibility higher. And in this case, too high. POS software, payment processors, banks, oh my!

Why do people insist on making things more complicated than they need to be? For heavens sake… messages are sent back and forth in bytes… bytes! One character is off and it screws up everything. Everything has to be configured exactly correctly, and there are hundreds of ways to screw it up.

Everyone keeps saying “it’s just the nature of the beast”. I don’t accept that as an excuse for software that I have control over — if it’s complicated then it’s wrong. But I guess have to live with the reality. Arghhhh…