Black Friday is under 48 hours away. We have seen much data and much analysis out there on the topic, but there are two fairly easy conclusions here…. well, make it three. First and foremost is that consumers are still going to get deals galore. The add-in third notion, or the second, is that inventories at stores are going to be very low and many items may have to be bought online (with free or low shipping to boot). But the big conclusion here is that it seems a foregone conclusion that the great deals and (quasi-) price matching and free shipping offered by retailers are still likely to create margin pressure for the retailers even if they have strong top-line sales data.
This is a sampling review of some of the promotions from major retailers. No particular order has been given. Apple, Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL) and Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) are worth note, but the major retailers featured are Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (NYSE: WMT), Best Buy Co. (NYSE: BBY), Costco Wholesale Corporation (NASDAQ: COST), Target Corp. (NYSE: TGT), Kohl’s Corp. (NYSE: KSS), Macy’s, Inc. (NYSE: M), and Nordstrom Inc. (NYSE: JWN).
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We just had a deluge of economic data in Personal Income & Spending for September, a rather solid figure on weekly jobless claims and in continuing jobless claims, and a somewhat tepid durable goods orders data. While there is still nothing robust, the jobs data this morning is the tipping point that allowed equities to run higher.
eBay Inc. (NASDAQ: EBAY) is having an issue which may have just cost sellers millions and millions of dollars in untold profits today. After doing random searches today on Christmas present purchases and with eBay being one of the online destinations, it was suddenly clear that something was wrong on eBay. The system was not working if you did not already have your item numbers known. Search functions yielded nothing and stores were out. If this were to happen after midnight on a Tuesday, it might not matter. But this outage is on a weekend day when so many buyers and sellers aren’t at work and are able to spend the effort to go eBaying.








Budweiser is back for US investors. It has been some time that US investors have been able to invest in an large beer company since Anheuser-Busch was acquired by InBev. But it is coming back to a US-stock-listing. Anheuser-Busch InBev has announced that starting Wednesday, September 16, its ADR will list on the NYSE under the old “BUD” ticker. The NYSE listing upgrades the company´s existing Level I ADR program, which was launched on July 1, 2009.



