Will Walmart’s extremely early holiday price cuts, or “rollbacks,” inspire other retailers to follow suit?
christmas
Elmo, Thankfully, Goes Missing
By 11.3.06
Walmart has declared missing a shipment of 100 Elmo T.M.X. dolls. The annoying-as-fuck toys went missing en route to a Walmart location in Bentonville, AR.
Christmas is Here, and Here, and Here…
By 11.3.06
It’s Christmas, motherfuckers, like it or not. Every year they start the holiday shopping push earlier and earlier. The worst offender we know of is Woodfield Mall in Schaumburg, IL. We swear they start putting Christmas shit up in September, we just can’t prove it. Also, one Chicago radio station has already shifted to round-the-clock holiday music. What the hell?
OfficeMax Black Friday Ad
By 11.3.06
OfficeMax boasts the skimpiest lineup of Black Friday sale items we’ve seen to date.
Breaking: Sears Black Friday Ad
By 10.30.06
Nary seconds ago, Sears Black Friday ad pooped onto the internet.
Kmart Black Friday Ad Surfaces
By 10.20.06
There’s no sexy newspaper insert scanned yet, but the hard facts of K-marts Black Friday specials have leaked onto the internet.
Ace Hardware Black Friday Ad Surfaces
By 10.17.06
The orgy of bargains and crazed pre-Christmas shopping, Black Friday, is only 38 days away.
X-treme Elmo to Terrorize Nation’s Retail Workers
By 9.19.06
If you happened to work in a store, as I did, during the Rosie O’Donnell induced Tickle Me Elmo craze, you’ll understand my legitimate feelings of horror when confronted with people lining up to buy Elmo T.M.X. Announced today, Elmo T.M.X.’s (the X stands for X-treme) reveal ended “months of unprecedented secrecy that’s had the toy industry abuzz.”
Walmart Does Away With Layaway
By 9.14.06
Walmart today announced they are phasing out their layaway programs. November 19th is the last day to place items for Christmas and they must be picked up by December 8th.
EXCLUSIVE: Giftassistant.com Scam, The Inside Scoop
By 8.24.06
After we talked about a bogus gift card site and mistakenly implied that the fellas listed as authors in the source code were involved with defrauding consumers, one of the came forward to clear up the facts.
Consumerist Investigates: Giftassistant.com Scam?
By 8.23.06
If it walks and talks like a duck, you probably need to lay off the acid. Likewise, Rikomatic’s experience with TheGiftAssistant.com quacks just like a fly-by-night scam.
Morning Deals Round-Up: Christmas Clearances
By 12.26.05
The Consumerist is technically off today, but we’re doing a bit of Boxing Day online browsing ourselves and thought we’d let you know what’s shaking, deal-wise.
Happy Holidays from The Consumerist
By 12.24.05
Since you’ll likely be busy with family and friends this weekend, let us leave you with this story of Christmas from Richard Shenkman’s Legends, Lies & Cherished Myths of American History:
Until the Civil War Christmas was but scantily observed. Most shockingly, retailers hardly seemed to take notice of the occasion. Historians report that the pages of the New York Tribune in 1841 did not contain a single example of advertising with a Christmas theme. It wasn’t until after the Civil War that retailers began experimenting with special Christmas sales. Once they did, however, it didn’t take long for them to discover the commercial possibilities offered by the holiday. By 1970 December had become the merchants’ single largest selling month of the year.
No matter what you celebrate over the next few days, let us join together to worship our Christmas’s most hallowed savior: Mammon.
How Verizon Stole Christmas
By 12.22.05
Verizon does something evil? Surely not our sweet, beatific megacorp! Yet that is the claim levied by the wicked town of Lonaconing, Maryland, whose annual Christmas lights were banned—for safety’s sake—by Verizon. Each year Lonaconing’s Christmas Light Decoration Committee would string their vine-like lights across the same poles used by Allegheny Power and Verizon to provide light and warmth to hundreds of poor children in the coal town.
”If a wire is hanging at 15 feet, a truck could snag it. It could snap a pole, and someone could get seriously injured,” Verizon spokeswoman Sandra Arnette said. ”We never said the town should not hang the lights. But safety is the first thing.”
The first thing is safety, Lonaconing, not your vile, pagan celebration! We would wish you coal in every stocking if we did not already imagine it would give your dwarvish children great joy to fondle each sooty treasure betwixt their stumpy mole fingers. And to put an inflatable Grinch balloon next to the Verizon office? Take your idolatry elsewhere, Lonaconing. We’ll have none of your craven imagery in this, the season of plastic, light-up Jesus.
