Holy Sales, Batman!

QUICK "Black Friday" update before I go out and brave the live shopping world myself with my brother and his fabulous girlfriend (something in the past my family has avoided but I've always kind of wanted to do, just because it's there and entertaining in a sick, crazy way):

Lots of places will be pricing items below cost today. I used to work at Circuit City, and we could see what the cost to the store was of an item (they estimated in labor and crap, too). The day after Thanksgiving, one of the managers made a big deal out of showing us a bunch of the "doorbusters" and other random sale items that were selling for significantly less than the cost to the store. So why did the store choose to "lose" money on these items? These were not things that had been sitting on the shelves, where any sale would be making more money than the $0 they were currently pulling in (like I talked about last entry). For the Circuit City model (and many other stores like it), they pull you in with some main big fabulous deal that really is a deal, but then count on you buying accessories like batteries, remote controls, blank CDs, software, etc. where they charge way more than cost and make up for the loss on the initial item and then some.
Can you do that? I'm not doing it so much in my shop. I'm going with the "everything on sale, things that already exist can go to any price because they already exist and things that would need to be made can go very close to cost and no matter what it's good to get people into my store and buying because if I can get them hooked on my product while it's cheap then later when it's not on sale they'll come crawling back because my wallpaper envelopes are made out of crack and I use really nice papers that are laced with heroin*" method myself, but if you think creatively, I'm sure there are ways of using the Circuit City method in your shop, too. Or the drug dealer method. That works, too.

Now where are those leftover cinnamon rolls?

*no actual drugs in any of my products, I'm afraid, but if you're a paper or texture nerd like me, they are fairly addictive.

Photos (items for sale on Etsy):
grey gardens ava bag by cookoorikoo
brass mushroom earrings by carolinableu