Black Friday came early at Target online Friday as...

Black Friday came early at Target online Friday as the retailer held a one-day-only “Back in Black Friday” sale. “Yeah, it’s only July,” read the email notice to Target customers, “but huge Black Friday deals are back.” Within minutes after we received the email, a Philips TV advertised as “$250 off” was listed as sold out. A 19-inch Vizio LED-backlit LCD TV was quoted at $99.99, or 50 percent off, and a Kodak 14-megapixel M52, at $89.99, was selling at a 40 percent discount. Twenty percent was shaved from the price of an Xbox 360 4-gigabyte console with two controllers, bringing the bundle to $199. A Kodak’s waterproof mini video camera with a 2-gigabyte MicroSD Card was tagged $44.99. The retailer took $5 off the price of a 7-inch Digital Labs portable DVD Player, bringing it to $49.99. The sale ran from midnight to midnight. Retailers may have to hold more of these out-of-season Black Friday specials to spur spending if sentiment reported in a consumer confidence study by Thomson Reuters and the University of Michigan released Friday carries through the rest of the year. “While spending gains can be expected in the second half of 2011, the overall trend is more likely to vary between lackluster and zero than between lackluster and robust,” said Richard Curtin, Surveys of Consumers chief economist. Resurgent spending “is not on the horizon,” he said. Long-term, changes in consumer spending could be significant, he said. “The consumer no longer has the financial wherewithal to power the economy into overdrive,” he said. Continued economic stagnation “may ultimately dampen their spending desires in favor of a more permanent shift toward economic caution and risk aversion,” he said.