Everything's on Sale! - consumer sales

Hello and welcome to this month's edition of Investment Insights!

This month we take a look at retail and the recent Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales in the U.S. following their Thanksgiving Holiday. In Australia we have just had the 'Click Frenzy' online sale, which was somewhat disappointing, but we can all look forward to the Boxing Day sales at the end of December. Those sales are similar to that of Black Friday which occurs every year in the U.S. with reports this year that sales were strong, perhaps debunking the theory that the consumer is dead (maybe they only buy bargains these days). Kevin Rose from the New York Times took a different look at the sales and concluded that they are carefully designed to make you behave like an idiot.