Macy’s Offers Free Merchandise to Lure Holiday Buyers

By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Jan 11, 3:24PM EST · Published Nov 5, 6:35AM EST

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Macy’s Offers Free Merchandise to Lure Holiday Buyers — © kate_sept2004 / Getty Images

The nation’s largest retailers have begun to announce their efforts to pull in customers this holiday season. These initiatives run from free shipping to longer hours over the Black Friday weekend. Macy’s Inc. (NYSE: M) has among the most aggressive plans that include offering free merchandise. The only catch is that buyers will need to fill in a mail-in rebate.

BestBlackFriday.com keeps track of advertisements and store hours from major retailers. It has gotten a copy of Macy’s promotions and one of its newspaper ads, and it posted the ad online earlier today.

The ads highlight 12 free products. Each carries a retail price of $10. The items on sale are available until 1 p.m. on Black Friday. Macy’s will be open from 5 a.m. Thanksgiving until 2 a.m. Black Friday. It will reopen on Black Friday at 6 a.m. The items are only available in stores. Each customer can only buy one. Once the coupon is mailed in, Macy’s says it will take six to eight weeks to get the credit. Customers will have to pay sales tax on the items.

Each of the items is a “doorbuster,” a term retailers use for inventory on sale for a brief time immediately after stores open.

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The 12 free items are a 1.5 quart slow cooker from appliance company Bella, a Ralph Lauren logo pillow, glassware from either Martha Stewart Essentials or Longchamp, a Mohawk bath rug, a selection of tote bags, several fashion watches, Mickey or Minnie plush toys from Disney, thermal underwear, a pair of gold-toed slippers, cultured freshwater pearl studs, graphic T-shirts made for young men and a 3.3-ounce bottle of Giorgio perfume.

Macy’s also will offer another set of sharp discounts. On some items that cost $25 or more, it has $10 mail-in rebates, in addition to $20 discounts on some items with price tags over $50. These discounts are available in both stores and online. However, to get the rebates in stores shoppers will need to buy them between 5 p.m. Thanksgiving and 2 a.m. on Black Friday, between 6 a.m. and 1 p.m. on Black Friday, and 8 a.m. and 1 p.m. on Saturday.

These kinds of discounts and the limited times they are available are part of the array of marketing methods retailers deploy at the traditional start of the holiday season. The retailers gamble that buyers will pick up other items when they visit stores or go online. They are “loss leaders” meant to get market share and capture sales before customers buy the same or similar items from competitors. As brick-and-mortar retailers downsize and sometimes fold, market share becomes essential to performance or even survival.

Macy’s has taken a step beyond free shipping and deep discounts. Its management believes “free” is a key to Thanksgiving and Black Friday traffic.

Macy’s Black Friday Ad for 2018

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.