After a month filled with more financial turmoil than most of us can stomach, there is good news at the end of the tunnel: The first batch of Black Friday ads have begun to surface. In spite of -- and likely because of --the dour retail predictions extending through the third quarter of next year, retailers are cutting prices to coax consumers into their stores. Remember, you can keep track on our running scorecard of Black Friday deals and discounts.

Let's jump right into the leaked ads!

Sears

Sears is the first department store to have a leaked ad this year but the prices for HDTVs and GPS units are much higher than we expected. Thankfully I don't see Sears setting the bar for HDTV prices this season. Dan de Grandpre from Dealnews.com also weighed in on the rumored sales prices for us, stating, "Sears, which is struggling, has been irrelevant to most tech buyers since the 1980s. In fact, many of its purported Black Friday TV "deals" are the same as or higher than prices you'd find on a comparison engine like PriceGrabber."

That said, don't count Sears out of your Black Friday plans completely; Dan recommends Sears for shoppers interested in Kenmore home appliances and Craftsman tools. The leaked ad has great deals on a kitchenware set, several craftsman tools as well as incredible discounts on Kenmore washers and dryers; in fact too many to list here, so go look for yourself!

The Sears ad comes on the heels of Ace Hardware's leaked ad which has been pulled until a final version is released. It appears Sears may be going the same route. According to Dan, Sears is already working on pulling this ad from many sites as they say it doesn't represent their Black Friday offerings. This is one of the reasons why Dealnews.com doesn't post leaked ads. Let's hope Sears takes this ad back to the drawing board and starts cutting prices across the board.

What other stores have been leaked?

Black Friday has traditionally been one of the busiest and most frantic shopping days of the year but with Christmas sales down in 2007 and the economy looking like a leftover fruitcake, many people are wondering if Black Friday can live up to past performances.

To better grasp the severity of the situation I enlisted the help of Dan de Grandpre, the current CEO of Dealnews.com. Dan is one of the most qualified individuals I know to assist in this as he has over 12 years of deal hunting experience as well as the ability to keenly identify industry trends. The Dealnews.com CEO backs up his team's experience surrounding retail sales and promotions by boasting that Dealnews.com has saved visitors hundreds of millions of dollars.

Black Friday needs only three things to be successful: retailers with amazing deals, willing consumers and money. Without any one of these items Black Friday ceases to be the spectacle that retailers and shoppers have come to know and love. In order to understand how the economy affects any of these three elements it is important to understand the relationship between retailers and consumers.