To allow customers to clean up in the sales, Argos is giving away 100 shower curtains with built-in pockets for tablets and mobile phones so savvy customers can bag a Black Friday bargain while they shower.
Argos predicts that visits to its website and apps from mobile phones and tablets will see their biggest spike between 6am and 7am this Black Friday (23 November), after it saw 90 per cent of all online visits from mobile devices at this time last year.
With around 21 per cent of Brits taking a shower between 6am and 7am, Argos created the shoppable shower curtains so customers needn’t miss out on a bargain, or disrupt their usual morning routine.
To nab a free shower curtain, customers simply need to visit one Argos’s five busiest Black Friday stores from 2017 - Gateshead Metrocentre, Leicester Belgrave Gate, Coventry Gallagher, Doncaster Wheatley Centre and Leeds Headrow. Shower curtains will be available on a first come, first served basis.
Shopping in the shower might sound odd, but in fact online shoppers will look to bag a bargain wherever they can. According to a survey of 2,000 people*, some 2.9 million Brits plan to shop from the loo, bath or shower, while 4.2 million plan on perusing Black Friday deals as their boss’s back is turned at work.
An Argos spokesperson said: “Whether shopping from bed, work or even the loo, our customers are savvy and love taking advantage of our fantastic deals. With amazing discounts on tech, toys and homewares, every second will count during the Black Friday period.
“We know that shoppers worry about missing a Black Friday bargain while they’re getting ready in the morning, so we’ve created this curtain to allow them to shower, shop and save!”
Argos’s Black Friday event launches on Friday 16 November. While the deals themselves remain a closely guarded secret, there will be sizable discounts available on a wide range of toys, homewares and electricals, including top brands such as Dyson, Phillips, Samsung, Xbox, PS4 and Lenovo. Games consoles, smart home products and video games are expected to be among the top sellers.
In 2017, Argos enjoyed its busiest hour ever for online visits (21:00-22:00 on Thursday 24 November), with almost 810,000 visits – a huge 13,496 shoppers per minute. Visits to Argos stores on Black Friday itself exceeded one million.
This year, Argos has recruited an additional 6,000 temporary colleagues to help out in stores and make local Fast Track deliveries. On Black Friday itself, they will be joined by hundreds of store support colleagues helping out on the shop floor.
To get the deals and top products out to stores and customers’ homes, Argos’s 11 distribution centres, which cover more than five million square feet of floor space, will have around 5,000 warehouse workers supported by 3,000 Fast Track drivers, using almost 1,000 delivery vans based at local stores.