Black Friday – Getting caught in the rush

There are various thoughts as to where the term Black Friday originated from, one I recently heard was that it was the date that retailers expected to break even – so move from the red (making a loss) into the black. Black Friday is no longer an American phenomena, Australia, Mexico, the UK and many European countries (just to name a few) also now run similar events.

In recent times you could argue it is so-called because of the havoc it wreaks. People die in the rushes that Black Friday creates. Some sources state that the day has claimed as many as 100+ lives in the last decade. Many hundreds of people are injured every year in the stampedes and commotion that have become associated with the day. Today the BBC are reporting on a Tesco which has had to close its doors this morning, due to what it calls ‘scuffles’ amongst customers.

Whilst physical stores are experiencing high volumes of customers, I suspect their online stores are experiencing many many more. Retailers have known that Black Friday was coming all year, so they are all super prepared aren’t they? It appears not.

Many retailers websites have been experiencing higher than normal volumes of traffic today. They expected that though. So why if they were expecting this have many hight profile sites gone down?

Argos – a previously struggling UK retailer – appears to be turning itself around, yet on what will almost certainly be its websites busiest day of the year, customers have to wait to access their site.

I didn’t think they would let this happen, so tried to click through to Argos.co.uk but was greeted with this page.

I followed their advice and refreshed the page a few minutes later, and amazingly the site worked! I did try again in a different browser a little later on and I got the same message, however again after a few minutes, it cleared.

On any other day of the year, customers would find this completely unacceptable, so why on its busiest day, did Argos let its site get swamped?

Argos wasn’t alone though. Currys site was also offline for many visitors. Unlike Argos Currys gave an estimated time that they would let me in.

They predicted around 20 minutes when I first joined the queue (yes I joined a queue to enter a website) but by the time I finally got in it had been well over an hour.

Currys Black Friday queue to get into their website

What I can’t understand is why their sister site, PC World, had no waiting time yet it took me over an hour to get onto the Currys homepage. When I was in everything seemed to load pretty sharpish, so I don’t know why there was such a long wait. Surely more people on a slower connection is better than a handful loading fast?

Tesco Direct by far was the worst though. Despite being the second largest retailer in the world (as measured by revenues) the wait to get into the Tesco Direct shop was ridiculous. After at least an hour an a half, Tesco’s 30 second refresh countdown timer was still going. Every 30 seconds it was checking if there was space to let me in, and there never was.

I don’t know what Tesco were offering – and I suspect many people will never know – because honestly, who is going to wait by their computer for more than 90 minutes to access a website?

Tesco’s Black Friday Calamity, customers can’t access Tesco Direct for hours.

So what lesson does this teach us? Well if you are a big retailer, who is taking part in Black Friday, make sure you invest in the appropriate infrastructure before the day, or else you could miss out on a huge number of potential sales.