Justin Bieber has announced that he will be releasing a CD exclusively at Wal-Mart the day after Thanksgiving. By decreasing the availability of his CD, Bieber will be lowering the supply and will have the potential to increase the price on his CD. However, the question remains as to how that would work with Wal-Mart being so focused on low-cost. Will Wal-Mart manipulate the price of the CD and keep it arbitrarily low in order to get people in the store for "Black Friday"? Or will they decrease the supply of the CD, thereby creating a vacuum in the supply for millions of heart-broken little girls (personally, the guy makes me want to vomit, but I suppose 31 year old men are not his target market), and keep releasing small quantities of the CD to maintain a constant stream of shoppers throughout the Christmas season?
Many retailers have also started to slash their prices in October in a desperate attempt to get people into their stores for the Christmas season. These decisions by major retailers may change the way Christmas shopping is done for a couple years, but I see the attempts eventually backfiring as people get more and more fed up with the insanity of shopping so early in the Christmas season.
3 comments:
I can see Walmart controlling the supply of the album so to maintain a continuous flow of twitter-pated young girls flocking to its stores on a daily basis this season. Why not? They need their parents to drive them there, so while the girls are out frolicking around the store their parents are shopping for consumables and other Christmas presents. Articles like this are a great signal to me that I should stay home and do all my shopping online this year.
I'm not sure how this whole thing with Wal-Mart getting exclusive rights to CDs works. They've done this before with other artists, and I think with a few movies as well. Sorry I don't have more to add.
Dave, more important than understanding how Wal-Mart works out the details of getting exclusive rights is realizing the importance of copyright laws in making such deals possible. America promotes entrepreneurship, innovation, and economic productivity by enforcing copyrights and patents. Artists like Justin Bieber wouldn’t have business models with so many diverse options, and Wal-Mart wouldn’t be investing in such deals, without the legal landscape that exists in America.
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