The company opened stores early Thursday morning, and won’t close them until late Friday night. It’s a time staff “actually look forward to,” its president says.
Kmart / Via blackfriday.com
Earlier this week, BuzzFeed News was given an intriguing offer: interview the president of Kmart, sometime around 5 a.m. Thanksgiving morning.
Alasdair James, who took the top job at the company just over a year ago after working at U.K. retailer Tesco, would be up early, a representative said, and keen to talk about holiday shopping and Black Friday live from a Detroit Kmart ahead of the chain's 6 a.m. Thursday opening — the start of a 40 hour non-stop shopping marathon that would end at 10 p.m. on Friday.
It seemed a little bizarre to discuss the suggested topics — what's "hot for holiday" and the chain's exclusive Adam Levine and Nicki Minaj lines — at the ungodly hour of 5 a.m. on Thanksgiving morning. But intrigue outweighed incredulity. Why was Kmart opening at 6 a.m. on Thanksgiving? Did the notion of Black Friday strike James as strange at all, especially after working at a British grocer for the last five years?
And why did the last line of his corporate bio describe him as "a man who would rather take the long route in a sports car than the short route in a limousine?" Was this 40-hour Kmart marathon the equivalent of a "long route in a sports car?"
We never addressed the sports car versus limousine angle, but I groggily spoke to James, and a couple of production people, on the phone at 5 a.m. Thursday morning from one of Kmart's rare 24-hour locations. His enthusiasm was palpable.
"I joined the organization last year just before Black Friday so this is the first time I've experienced the fun of Black Friday in full," said James, who is British. "This is not an event that really happens in the UK or in China where I worked before and therefore it's new for me in that respect."
via IFTTT
No comments:
Post a Comment