Retailers' Heavy Discounting Should Pressure Q4 Margins

One of the issues we have been discussing has been how widely and deeply Retailers will be discounting, and what it means to the overall economy.

The most recent review of price cutting is that they are both deep and broad. Our quick survey of both brick and mortar coupons and online savings codes shows that discounting is ramping up dramatically.  This will likely pressure for Q4 profit margins.

Attached are 2 PDFs we scraped together (from various shopping fiends we know); These represent almost 40 major retailers discounting for the first post Black Friday weekend's sales events.

Download Gap, Banana Republic, Old Navy.pdf

Download 6 Store, 30 online coupons.pdf

As you can see, the price cutting is quite dramatic

Retailers are nervous, judging by the considerable price cutting thats going on:

~~~

UPDATE:  November 30, 2006 4:25pm

Google Checkout has gotten into the Holiday discounting spirit!

>
A sampler of various Store Sample coupons (not including Google):