You're a retailer and you're set to get a fast start out of the gates following Thanksgiving with advertised specials that make consumers sit up and take notice. The only problem is that the great deals you plan to advertise are going public on the internet weeks before you planned.
Blackfriday.gottadeal.com, DealTaker.com and BF-06.com are among a group of web sites that exist, at least in part, to let consumers know where to go for the best deals.
"Retailers are not a big fan of those sites," National Retail Federation spokesperson Ellen Davis told McClatchy Newspapers. "If retailers wanted their customers to know about Black Friday deals early, they’d put them up on their own Web sites."
Retailers' displeasure with these web sites has taken the legal, if not yet litigious, route. Some stores have written to site operators demanding ad/circular reprints be removed from public view because their use is a violation of content copyrighted by merchants.
For the most part, letters from company lawyers have not deterred sites with going public on retailers' promotional plans. Recently, however, BFAds.net removed an ad on its web site after lawyers from Linens-n-Things objected in writing.
Michael Brim, a teenager from San Jose, California who operates BFAds.net, said retailers who think they're putting a lid on deals being leaked by writing to sites such as his are kidding themselves.
BFAds.net gets much of its information from other sites and message boards. Still other information comes from direct sources who have many other places they can (and do) go with the information.
Discussion Questions: In what ways are a retailer's business affected when the details of a sales promotion are leaked early? What can retailers do to effectively keep information private until they want it to go public?