Would You Bet on Black Friday?: Q&A With Bookmaker.com

Betting on sporting events is a common pastime, whether it’s odds on a Super Bowl win or the Kentucky Derby. One betting Web site, though, is hoping that people will want to wager on Black Friday, one of the biggest shopping days of the year for retailers. Bookmaker.com offers potential betters the ability to wager on how much the average consumer will spend on Black Friday and how many shoppers will turn up in stores and on retailer Web sites.

This is not Bookmaker’s first foray into non-sports betting. In the past, the firm offered betting on the price of oil and gold and even the location of Jimmy Hoffa’s grave. But even so, setting up retail betting poses its own unique challenges, said Bookmaker CEO Mickey Richardson in a conversation with BNET Retail.

BNET: So how did you guys come up with this? Is there a shopping-obsessed person on your staff?

Mickey Richardson: One of our guys was watching CNBC and they were talking about retail sales and Black Friday, wondering what the economy is going to be like and if there’s an uptick or a downtick. So one of my guys came across my desk, and they usually send me 10 or 15 ideas every two or three days with these kinds of media props, and I said: “This one’s a good one!” I know a lot of people on Wall Street are going to be eyeing this number to see what’s going on with the economy. Is there a desire to spend money, or is there a desire to hold back on it? I told them: “Go out and do as much research as you can, throw the numbers up, and go with God after that.”

BNET: What kind of response have you gotten?

MR: The average spend seems to be more popular. It’s very spread out on what the average shopper is going to go for. We’re a little early on this. After this weekend, we’ll make some business on this, for sure. On Monday, they’ll start talking about it on different Web pages, and it will pick up for sure.

BNET: Is anyone betting on a particular price range that shoppers will spend?

MR: Right now, for the number of shoppers, it’s between 161 million and 180 million. I’m looking at average spend, and the volume is across the board.

BNET: Is predicting retail sales results more of a brain drain, than say, a Super Bowl or some other sporting event?

MR: Clearly, sports is more our expertise. We sometimes have to decline on some props that we do because it’s out of our realm. But there are other times when we’ll just take a chance and put it up. A couple of years ago, we did the number of hurricanes that were going to reach the US. It wasn’t that popular, but we started getting a lot of meteorologists claiming our numbers were dead on. Our guys know what they’re doing and they can figure it out if they have enough data. There is a science to it, but we don’t have enough hours in the day to do what the analysts do on Wall Street.

BNET: But all of these analysts have different numbers, even in their interpretations of Black Friday. How do you manage the data from them? Average it out?

MR: That’s what we plan on doing. And if the numbers are all over the map, we’ll just grade it as ‘no action,’ and everybody will get their money back. We try to be fair with it.

BNET: If the Black Friday offering is successful, would you consider other retail holidays?

MR: Absolutely…Halloween and Easter. My guys downstairs that develop this stuff, they love to see that they’re catching the imagination of our clients. If people actually like it, they’ll go back to the drawing board and see what else they ca do with it.