Black Friday 2009 went pretty smoothly … Black Friday 2010 won’t.

Mind you I only went to my local Walmart for Black Friday and I hadn’t been to one since 2006, but I know 2007 & 2008 were just nuts as they had always been.  After the death of a Walmart employee in Long Island, NY last year (something I heard my local store employees reference multiple times), I knew things were going to have to change thie year, I just didn’t know how radical it would be.

The biggest key items, of which there were about 10, were scattered through out the store.  The $398 laptop I was after as a fairly cheap way for me to get a Windows7 system was in the front of the store in the optical center.  The sale was due to start at 5:00 A.M. and I arrived at at about 3:45 A.M. to discover the new system: slips would be handed out at 5:00 A.M. for the laptops with a limit of one per customer, and a total of 18 were to be sold.  They said they wouldn’t hand the slips out before hand so I went off to pick up some oatmeal and search out the other items was after like a 1 TB external hard drive.

I get back to the vision center at about 4:00 A.M. and the Walmart employee has changed and they’ve handed out four slips already.  Whatever, I get my slip and I’m fifth in line for the laptop.  About 4:20 A.M. another employee comes by and says the $298 laptops are all claimed and I hear there are only five of the $398 ones left.

4:40 A.M. and the last slip for the $398 laptops is handed out … and now the complaining begins.

Angry customers from other sections of the store are walking out of the store complaining about how could the store be out of the items already if the sale starts at 5:00 A.M. … a couple women walk in at 4:45  and come to get a $398 laptop, they walk out complaining at the top of their lungs about how this was unfair, and they weren’t staying if they couldn’t get their primary item.

At 5:00 A.M. we were allowed calmly into the vision center where an employee collected our clips and another employee placed the laptops in our carts.  No fuss, no muss, no fighting … and then I made it out to the bulk items such as the hard drives and it was the usual chaos.

While I applaud the changes Walmart made this year, it’s a one year bandage and won’t work a second year.  There are two scenarios that will happen next year:

• People will arrive earlier than ever to line up for the slips.  Next year I wouldn’t be surprised to hear about people being there at 1:00 A.M. or earlier.  (remember, I’m in a small town, that is about the same as people in a big city lining up the day before)
• The slips will be held strictly to the 5:00 A.M. rule and you will have a mob trying to get slips which will slide us back into what past years have been like.

So what can stores do now to protect their employees and customers next year?  The only solution I can possibly see is to come up with something different than the slips, throw everyone off with a totally different idea.  Year after that?  Back to the slips.  Keep changing it up, keep the consumers off balance as to how things are going to be done each year.  Complicated?  Yes, but it’s about the only way I can think of to keep everyone involved safe.

Your thoughts?  How would you change Black Friday to keep everyone safe?