Black Friday - What's new?

Black Friday has been historically one of the most popular shopping days with people lining in numbers in front of the local stores hours before they open.

So what's different about the Black Friday this year? Here are a few things that have made news recently:

• Stores are planning to open early, even as early as Thursday evening. Toys R Us store opens at 9:00 pm Thurday night followed by Walmart at 10:00 pm. Other retailers like Target, Macys, Kohl's and Best Buy all open at midnight. Close to 200,000 signatures were collected at change.org to protest the early opening of Target store.
• Occupy movement made famous by Occupy Wall Street is targeting a similar operation Occupy Black Friday to keep shoppers away from big box stores and other national retailers to help the local mom and pop stores. The tea party is organizing an anti-occupy movement.
• Malls for the first time will be tracking cell phones to do some market research on customer behaviors. The tracking will be at the Promenade Temecula in southern California and Short Pump Town Center in Richmond, Va. and will last from Black Friday through New Year's day and will be done anonymously.

Also over the past 5 years more and more people are turning to online stores like Amazon and eBay. comScore in its holiday online spending report has forecasted an annual growth of 15% with online retail spending for the November – December period to reach $37.6 billion. Keeping this in mind here is a nice Infographic noting a few things that web users can do to better protect themselves from online scams.


 Infographic by Veracode Application Security

Happy Thanksgiving and an enjoyable shopping!