I know in the US there are Black Friday sales coming up and surprisingly there are a ton of non US residents that are keeping track of what is going to be on sale there. Basically, for some people if the deal is worth it they will travel to make the purchase.

What surprised me is how some stores here are advertising its sales as a boxing day pre-sale already. For non Canadian readers, think of this day as the Black Friday here (Occurs on December 26th). I guess marketing wise some companies are really banking on the pre-programmed mentality that people have when it comes to shopping. So they figure if they throw in that term people will start coming in droves.

People are usually disappointed when they actually get to the store in these scenarios. Funny enough, some people actually buy something anyways as they feel silly for traveling and not returning with anything. Best just to wait for the real sales.

I was passed this news about a motor company in the US called Max Motors who offers what’s got to be one of the most eyebrow raising business strategies I have seen. Essentially, by purchasing a car through them you have an option of receiving either a $250 gas card or a gun.

The company is promoting this fairly heavily too as when I visited the site the message was pretty loud and clear about the gun offer as you can see here:

It’s kind of mind boggling in some ways to read a quote saying “We are aware of the gasoline and crime problem in America. Max Motors, the Country Dealer wants to be part of the solution and not part of the problem”.

The firearm laws must be lot more lenient down there compared to here. From a business perspective, this will probably generate a lot of buzz and sales for them as it does almost everything such as the business doing something unique and it gets people to talk about them. It seems so wrong though from a morality point of view.

I’m actually interested in seeing how that business does afterwards as while I’m sure there will be a lot of protest, this could be those cases where for some businesses any publicity is good publicity.