"Black Friday" sale comes early at Wal-Mart, Best Buy stores

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Wal-Mart seemingly has transformed Friday, Nov. 2, into Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving in the United States that marks the beginning of the traditional Christmas shopping season, as the world's largest retailer today has started a "Secret Sale" at its stores.

In its exclusive sale, called the “Secret In-Store Specials”, Wal-Mart will offer Toshiba’s HD-A2 HD DVD player for a mere $98.87. The sale will start this Friday at 8am through the weekend, Nov. 4 at retail stores only, a Wal-Mart spokesperson said.

Besides the Bentonville, Ark.-based Wal-Mart, the top US consumer electronics retail chain, Best Buy has also announced a one-day pre “Black-Friday” sale at its stores. Best Buy stores on Thursday began selling the Toshiba HD-A2 HD DVD player for $99. And later at day, reports emerged saying that the retailer had already run out of supplies. Surprisingly, the company on its Website late Thursday night marked the product out of stock.

The player, which originally was priced at $499, was previously priced at just under $200 and is priced for $197.99 at Circuit City and Amazon.com, and $299.99 at most other places.

The discount stores generally hold their Black Friday sales on the Friday after Thanksgiving, but Best Buy and Wal-Mart are promoting some products at 'Black Friday' prices in order to generate early interest from shoppers.

Other items that go on sale at cheap prices include an electric Fisher-Price NASCAR toy car for $144.72, Sanyo 50-inch Plasma HDTV for $998, Acer laptop computer for $348 and, of course, the Toshiba HD-A2 HD DVD player for $99. Wal-Mart is also selling all HD DVD movies for $14.96 each.

Wal-Mart the world's largest retailer store was first opened in 1962. Walton opened the first Wal-Mart store, “Walmart discount city” in Rogers, Arkansas. The company was incorporated as the Walmart Stores Inc. on October 31, 1969. Wal-Mart does business under nine different retail formats: supercentres, food and drugs, general merchandise stores, bodegas, cash and carry stores, member warehouse clubs, apparel stores, soft discount stores and restaurants.

Richfield, Minnesota, USA-based Best Buy Co., Inc. is a Fortune 100 company and the largest specialty retailer of consumer electronics in the United States and Canada. This discount chain was named "Company of the Year" by Forbes magazine in 2004, "Specialty Retailer of the Decade" by Discount Store News in 2001, ranked in the Top 10 of "America's Most Generous Corporations" by Forbes magazine, and entered Fortune Magazine's List of Most Admired Companies in 2006.

The price drop from Best Buy and Wal-Mart comes as a big boost to Toshiba’s efforts to grow in an ongoing high-definition format war between Sony-backed Blu-ray and Toshiba-backed HD DVD.

Japanese maker of consumer electronics Toshiba has launched their latest HD DVD player, the HD-A2 HD DVD at the International Consumer Electronics Show this year in January.

This entry-level HD DVD player is capable of HD DVD, DVD and CD playback as well as hardware decoding of H.264 (MPEG4 AVC), VC-1 and MPEG2 (standard DVD) streams. It also features Sharc DSP to process audio in Dolby Digital, Dolby Digital Plus, Dolby TrueHD (2 channel), DTS and DTS-HD formats. The device can output video in 720p (1280x720) and 1080i (1920x1080) resolutions using HDMI or component interconnection and multi-channel audio using HDMI or S/PDIF connectors.