Archived How did the 9PM opening go at your store?

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we had our initial rush, and then was dead from about 130 on. this is my 8th black friday and every year we make about the same amount of money. within a few thousand dollar of the same amount every year, so is it really beneficial to open at 9pm on thanksgiving, when in 2005 we opened at 6am black friday and still made the same amount?
 
My store was bad. Front end, logistics, & ap were 90% ready for action. Salesfloor & soft lines were only 60% ready. Poorly organized.
Ism, I agreed with you, why does spot need to open earlier for the same amt of sales?
We had limited real deals compare to other stores.
One real big plus, my itouch worked great for item search.
 
We should've had the chance to walk the ad and locate all the hidden deals beyond the door buster map we were given. :/ it was embarrassing to not know where lots of items were & constantly hear that on the walkies. We had about 1000 people lined up, so much for staying away on thanksgiving. Other stores in our area had people lined up since Tuesday. I appreciate my team members more than ever though, proud to work with such an awesome group of people!
 
My STL took the black&white and did the same thing, so we knew where everything was since we all had a copy of the black&white. I was crowd management in electronics, and it went quite smoothly....8 people had electronics keys, 2 cashiers were designated for the boat, and then 4 of us did the crowd management (I was the TL overseeing it all plus toys). Come 1am, I made sure that all of the game cases were locked back up and at 3am, my ETL-AP, Sr.TPS, and myself took all the iPods and iPads that we had locked up behind the boat, put what we could back in the cases, and then backstocked all of the rest. This was one of the smoothest Black Fridays (this is my 11th with Target) that we have had.
 
It was the same at midnight last year. Busy for the first 2 hours then dead for the rest of the night. With plenty of guests angry that we didn't have alot left. At some times there were more team members than guests on the sales floor
 
Luckily, I worked the Wednesday overnight for the setup and ad setup so I pretty much knew where everything was. I saw the black and white printouts but nothing was wrote on them :\
 
it went awesome at our store! up in sales from last year by a large amount when i left. the 9pm open at our store was a good idea. It did help that the store that is closest to us was not ready for it. We had so many guests coming in complaining at them saying they walked in and left because no one knew what they were doing. I'd love to see what that stores sales were.
The was by far the best black friday i have ever worked.
 
I heard about the B&W printouts around 4am and my tm's & I never saw one. I wish we could've been clocked in or at least been able to have more than 15 mins before doors were opened. It would've been great to walk through as a group too. I think it went well but I know it could've run smoother those first 2 hours.
 
Ours ran a lot smoother then I expected,largly due to the very well behaved and friendly guests,helped by the fact that we had enough 37" tvs to cover the first half hour,overall probably the smoothest bf ever for me.Maybe there is something to be said for letting people who don't know anything run the show.The prep team left at 5:30 am on Thursday morning,and most returned at 6pm thursday evening.
 
It was insane early on, but organized from what I heard. I missed the initial rush & came in around 5AM, helping my TL in Electronics & hundreds upon hundreds of guests. My TL left a couple of hours into my shift & left me in charge in Electronics. I had a great team to work with & a couple of great cashiers back there who knocked Red Cards out of the park. I helped guests, answered any questions (from guests & the cashiers), kept endcaps filled & hunted items store-wide thanks to the lovely black & white master copies of the ad. I kept one on me, as well as a door buster map & helped locate numerous items for our guests.

Everything ran smooth, although the opening team told me it was crazy early on (thousands in line throughout the store & down the parking lot/street). We literally stayed insanely busy all day long, with only a couple of moments of down time. Overall, I wish every Black Friday could run this smoothly. Hopefully the closing team has a good night.
 
I agree with most others, this seemed like one of the more smoother black fridays in awhile. Had all ipods/ipads/nooks/3DS' stocked in one of those rolling cages by the electronics boat, and anyone who wanted them had to stand in that line separate from the front lanes. Yeah.. that line wrapped around all of entertainment and then some (only 2 registers at the boat). We didn't sell out of anything that was stationed in electronics too quickly except for the Canon T3 bundle, the Nikon 310, and the nooks but the nooks lasted till after the initial rush which was awesome (around midnight).

Overall pretty cool, and the shoppers all were in good moods except for a slight few. No problems in crowd control.
 
I heard our store sent people home earlier in the day and that the zone and reshop had been all done around 6 or so. I go to work in 20 minutes so I will see how much we missed sales by.
 
We scheduled a GSTL and a GSA in addition to myself for the daytime, so I pulled two good cashiers and went over to electronics for the day. The LOD was very happy to see us back there, and left me to run the boat. I had a great team, as my electronics TMs were on top of their stuff! Ended up with over $600k when I finally left around 6:30, with 96 redcards.

Sold out of iPad mini units, but had plenty of instock items for everything else.
 
Crazy busy till midnight, dead after that.
Willing to bet we don't do any more than we did last year.
A complete waste of man hours and people's personal lives.

(edit; ptl has a good point, I meant TM's personal lives.)
 
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We scheduled a GSTL and a GSA in addition to myself for the daytime, so I pulled two good cashiers and went over to electronics for the day. The LOD was very happy to see us back there, and left me to run the boat. I had a great team, as my electronics TMs were on top of their stuff! Ended up with over $600k when I finally left around 6:30, with 96 redcards.

Sold out of iPad mini units, but had plenty of instock items for everything else.

Well played sir /salute

We were only at 40 something when i left earlier.
 
Really busy tell about 1:00 am or so (not as bad as last year though) then freakishly dead after that. I think our store will end up way down on sales over last year.
 
Luckily, I worked the Wednesday overnight for the setup and ad setup so I pretty much knew where everything was. I saw the black and white printouts but nothing was wrote on them :\

It happened at my store too. Print out the store ad specific printout, will help you too.
 
It was much better than last year. We made $400k+ from 9pm to midnight, but after 2am it went dead.
 
It was busy the first 2 hrs but it wasn't dead either afterwards either. It was steady kinda like a typical Monday day or something like that not really busy but really slow either. I will say after it was all over I was ready to crash!
 
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