Black Friday, as the day after Thanksgiving has come to be known, is the day when most retailers get themselves back into the black. It is also a bargain-hunter's delight. In the age of Internet, several websites emerged dedicated to helping shoppers decide in front of which store to pitch their tents. One of those sites, GottADeal.com, has reportedly landed Target's (TGT) Black Friday ad. Target, it appears, is taking a rather aggressive approach to the upcoming Holiday shopping season.

According to the website, the retailer will offer a 32-inch Westinghouse LCD HDTV for $246, which GottADeal.com's founder Brad Olson calls the "lowest price that we've ever seen for that model." The ad also touts $3 toasters and coffeemakers, and 50% discount on kids' clothes and toys.

Wal-Mart (WMT) won't close Thanksgiving weekend -- not at all. The world's largest retailer is going to keep its stores open 24 hours in an attempt to manage demand for entry during the busiest shopping days of the year. The company has announced it will also implement other crowd-control measures. The festivities start at 5 AM on November 27, 2009. Of course, this doesn't involve any change fro the Wal-Mart Supercenters which already remain open 24 hours a day, but it does address the 800 stores that aren't.

The 24-hour access alone won't do much to alleviate the pressure from thrill-seekers and the bargain-crazed who will want to push through immediately. To help with this problem, Wal-Mart is allowing people to gather in different parts of the store when waiting for the deals to kick off. According to Wal-Mart spokesman David Tovar, "If you've got a 200,000-square-foot store, people will be dispersed throughout the store instead of lined up outside the store." Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

As the old infomercial guys love to say ... "But wait, there's more!"

As Peter Cohan wrote this weekend, sadly, some folks were killed over the holiday weekend due to what could be easily argued as Black Friday madness. In the zeal for saving a few dollars on cheaply-made, bargain-basement disposable consumer goods, one man was trampled to death as he opened the doors of a Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. (NYSE: WMT) store, while two other people were shot to death outside a Toys R Us store. Joy to the world, the materialism has won.

Although I enjoy covering the Black Friday event every year, the industry-made madness has become such an event that actually dumps respect for human beings into the garbage disposal, so that those crazy souls wanting to save 30% on shoes or a flat-screen television can get their fix.

I mean, is this what the holidays have come down to? The New York Times has a decent perspective on this. But, of course, America has always been about materialism and consumerism. Those are the factors that have made the U.S. the reigning economy worldwide. It's a free country for anyone to do as they wish, from billion-dollar companies to consumers with change in their pockets purchasing power. If we're all trained like Pavlov's dogs come the day after Thanksgiving -- credit cards in hand at 5:00am -- then it's no surprise some folks will die for the self-indulging greed of other human beings. Fa la la la la, la la la la.

It looks like we may have talked ourselves into an overly gloomy outlook for this year's holiday sales. Maybe that was the plan all along -- to depress expectations so much that it would be much easier to exceed them. And it looks like that's what happened -- analysts expected sales to rise 1% in the November/December 2008 shopping season -- and actual Black Friday results were up 3%.

Granted that's not an apples to apples comparison but the International Council of Shopping Centers predicted a 1% rise in same store sales this November/December shopping season and it has already revised its forecast upwards to 2%. For Black Friday, the 3% sales increase amounted to $10.6 billion in sales.

And there were some significant differences across different regions. The South gained the most, 3.4%, over 2007 while in the Northeast sales rose the least, 2.6%.

Nevertheless, other analysts remain gloomy. ShopperTrak has estimated that 9.9% fewer shoppers will descend on stores this November/December shopping season, producing a sales gain of 0.1%. And Gallup suggests that the average individual will spend 29% less, or $616, compared to 2007.

While Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. (NYSE: WMT) keeps racking up sales as the king of retail in a depression, competitors certainly don't want to lose out on holiday sales. In fact, with such a bleak holiday shopping season predicted by multiple market pundits, some retailers are trying to divert those upcoming Wal-Mart shoppers into their own shoppers. But how?

Kohl's Corp. (NYSE: KSS) held a three-day Christmas sale that actually ends today -- the day before Black Friday. The department store-style retailer offered price cuts to the tune of 40% during the last three days in an attempt to steal some of Wal-Mart's customers. You know, the ones who will brave chilly temperatures and 5:00 a.m. waiting lines come Friday morning. The same goes for retailer Macy's, Inc. (NYSE: M). Macy's planned its biggest discounts last week, trying to pull in Black Friday shoppers a full week early.

Did the strategy work? This year would be a hard year to measure since not all things are equal. Shoppers are reluctant to pull out the purse or wallet, the stock market is psychotic, home sales are at a standstill, unemployment is rising fast and the economy is circling the average American like a shark.

But then again, this is why competitive pressures have surfaced: retailers are having to fight tooth and nail for every shopper dollar this year, and all the stops must be pulled out. A Gallup poll recently indicated that Americans will spend an average of $616 on gifts this year, a 29% drop from 2007. When a third of the holiday retail dollars go away, it s bare-knuckled fight among retailers - nothing less.

Most of us are recovering from a hefty array of Thanksgiving dinner portions this morning, and some brazen and brave souls are probably standing in the cold (and have been for hours) waiting for the doors to open early today. Retailers across the country will be opening at 5am or 6am this morning to recruit as many bargain shoppers as possible.

This way, each one can make the inventory dials spin like mad and move as much product off the shelf as any one day can allow. As usual, the bulk of the sales items at some of the largest retailers in the U.S. are centered around home electronics and electronic gadgets. There's some toys on sale too, of course!

With all that said, if you're one of the patient folks who didn't get up in darkness to slog down to a customer line at your favorite retailer, I'll do some of the entertaining work for you today. Like this writer, many of you reading this probably traveled from home for Thanksgiving. I'm updating you from the warm confines of a mountain lodge in Missouri. With a hot cup of coffee, a laptop and high-speed internet connection, I've collected some bargains for you. As such, you may want to call your spouse if he or she is in line at some retailer and snatch up some of the below.

First of all, visit the below websites if you really want a primer on all the Black Friday sales this morning:

• www.bfads.net
• www.gottadeal.com
• www.fatwallet.com