Pricing

The year’s most popular discount shopping event, referring to the Friday after Thanksgiving, is arriving ahead of Halloween this year, with some promotions beginning this week and others throughout November.

Target Corp., the mass merchandiser with about 1,750 stores nationwide, for months has been shortchanging its customers who use certain manufacturers’ coupons by crediting them for a fraction of their face value.

If there's a halo product for retail this holiday season, it's Steve Jobs' iPad, the fastest-selling new product in Apple's history.

Groupon has scored another nationwide retailer with a deal on Monday featuring L'Oreal's natural cosmetic franchise, The Body Shop.

For the past several years, Black Friday has ranked as the largest shopping day of the year, in both sales and traffic. But analysts say a host of factors is converging to make it likely that Black Friday 2010 will set a record.

Two key trends have dominated the retail sector this year: the robust growth of online shopping and the shift to cash payments from credit.

The two may seem in opposition as online shoppers often use credit to pay for their purchases, but more often online retailers are trying to woo the cash-only customer by providing alternative payment methods.

Twenty or 25 percent off, once considered a hefty discount, is practically nothing nowadays, as most consumers must be enticed further to open their wallets or purses.

As a small business owner, Nancy Rhodes is always looking for a bargain. So with a commercial real estate crisis gripping her hometown of Phoenix, she took advantage of desperate landlords to open a temporary store with a short-term lease and a steep discount on rent.

Forecasters expect a better holiday season for U.S. retailers, but say the price will be more discounts to get consumers shopping.

The National Retail Federation expects holiday sales to rise 2.3% over last year to $447.1 billion, the biggest increase in three years, in part because of more aggressive pricing strategies. The tone was set by the discount-driven back-to-school shopping season, which wrapped up in September with strong sales of children's and teen clothing, according to MasterCard Inc.'s SpendingPulse unit that tracks payment by cash, check and credit card.

This Halloween is the third in a row for which marketers and retailers are playing up discounts, deals and bargains rather than goblins, ghosts and vampires.