With promotions, discounts and doorbusters already well under way on Thanksgiving Day itself, many big-box retailers are making Black Friday stretch longer than ever. The Lede is checking out the mood of American consumers in occasional vignettes Thursday and Friday as the economically critical holiday shopping season kicks off.
4:41 P.M. |Life in the Slow Lane
Not far from the frantic crush of local malls, the merchants of downtown Upland, Calif., quietly rolled a few racks of merchandise out to the sidewalks under the bright sun of an 80-degree day. They stood back and waited.
At 10 a.m., a few shoppers started to stroll through town. But it was hardly a hotbed of consumer activity.
“I think we’re going to get a little bit more business tomorrow than today,” said Jake McCarty, assistant manager at Roy’s Cyclery, which has been in business since 1962. “People think most small shops are going to be closed on Black Friday.”
The downtown business district of Upland, a 14-block area that sits 35 miles east of Los Angeles, dates from the citrus boom of the 1890s. With more than a dozen restaurants and nearly 200 businesses, the area has seen both better times and worse. If anything, it’s showing a slight uptick from the recent economic crash, with city sales tax revenue up about by 2 percentage points in the 2011-2012 fiscal year, according to Jeff Zwack, the city’s development service director.
But you wouldn’t necessarily sense the comeback Friday, since the local merchants association has taken pains to avoid competing with the giant retailers on their big day. In fact, Historic Downtown Upland Inc. was planning a “shop till you drop” event for the evening of Dec. 13, with music, sidewalk sales and Santa stationed in the gazebo in the center of town.
Despite the low expectations, a few crowd-averse shoppers wandered the streets.
Brandi Koenke, 40, of Claremont, stopped in the Utility Boardshop with her family of four. It was their second stop after a quick venture into a nearby Kohl’s discount department store. The shop was offering a discount on a watch that she was looking at for her 15-year-old son, Ryan.
After the experience at Kohl’s, she said, “this was much nicer. No crowds.” It was her last stop for the day.
Down the street at the bike shop, Kendrick Stallard emerged with a small bag of supplies.
“This has nothing to do with the fact that the Friday is black,” said Mr. Stallard, a 22-year-old choreographer from Fontana. “We’re going on a bike adventure, and we couldn’t care less.”
Across the street, Mary Aneen slowly made her way through the displays in front of the antique stores. “I don’t shop on Black Friday,” she said. “Too many people, too many lines, and you never get what you want. I like antiques.”
Down the street, next to the Metrolink commuter train station, Fred Paciocco, owner of Pacific Wine Merchants, had time to give a tour of the shop, which is in a city-owned former Santa Fe train station built in 1937. He pointed out the specially ordered light fixtures, the original cabinetry and the old ticket counter that now serves as the back bar for wine tasting.
Mr. Paciocco took the slow start on Friday in stride; he had done good business in the days leading up to Thanksgiving, and he expected to do well at Christmas, too.
“We’re like most retailers,” he said. “If you don’t do it in November or December, you’re not going to make it.”
— Rebecca Fairley Raney
3:15 P.M. |Hunting TVs and Telephones in the Great North
Shoppers waiting outside Sam’s Club in Eagan, Minn., for Friday’s 7 a.m. opening clung to free Starbuck’s Holiday Blend coffee as they endured freezing temperatures and biting winds and collected brightly colored vouchers for laptops and big-screen TVs.
The biggest draw: a 96-cent Samsung Galaxy S III smartphone. Once inside, they beelined for tickets for the 63 in stock, which sold out shortly after the store opened. Customers could make an appointment for later in the day or another day to purchase the phone, choosing from three carriers, Verizon, T-Mobile or Sprint.
“O.K., this is my last blue for Sprint,” an employee called out at 7:08 a.m.
Erin Mustonen, 23, a consultant from Eagan who graduated from college last December, was the first in line outside Sam’s, arriving with her boyfriend at 5:30 a.m. and snagging a 65-inch Vizio Smart TV for $998. It was sweet redemption since she was the 21st shopper to seek a 60-inch Vizio Thursday night at nearby Walmart, which had 20 in stock.
Sam’s early-bird shoppers voiced satisfaction in having had a normal Thanksgiving celebration, bucking the Thursday-night push.
“I don’t like it,” said Denny Johnson, 66, a retired property manager from Burnsville who had come for a 51-inch Samsung TV. “They’re going to start this on Veterans Day if they keep going.”
Subbamanoz Kristam, a 27-year-old software engineer living in Eagan, stood outside with a friend while their wives huddled in the car – only to learn that the Samsung doorbuster didn’t include AT&T customers. The lines seemed longer than last year, he said.
Mr. Kristam’s friend, Praveen Elagala, 30, also a software engineer in Eagan, had embarked on his first Black Friday to buy a 55-inch Samsung LED TV for $998. “It’s pretty exciting,” he said, sipping his coffee. “My wife will be happy.”
Archie Weatherspoon IV, 29, a probation officer from St. Paul, came with his wife and two young boys, who munched on McDonald’s hash browns as they awaited a Samsung Galaxy ticket.
Mr. Weatherspoon had almost called off the plan for their first Black Friday outing after watching a YouTube video of a Thursday night cellphone fight at an out-of-state Walmart. “I don’t want to bring my kids out if it’s going to be that chaotic,” he said. But he decided to trust Sam’s for a “more organized” set-up and left with a Samsung ticket and five $9.98 Blu-ray DVDs.
Chuck Magnusson, 74, a retired highway engineer from Detroit Lakes, bought a Samsung Galaxy for Sprint’s unlimited texting plan so he could keep up with his dexterous kids.
Jeff Sengbusch, 48, a health care support clinician from South St. Paul, hazarded his first Black Friday in more than 20 years. “I’ve worked maintenance at a mall – I’ve seen arms broken, people shoved and kids trampled,” he said.
Concerned about the economy and President Obama’s re-election, Mr. Sengbusch said he planned to cut holiday buying way back, having typically spent $250 to $300 on each of his children. “I’m setting a $50 limit because I can’t afford the future taxes. I can only give so much.”
Others succumbed to Black Friday whims. “I didn’t even want it,” Meshia Flood, 36, a student from Eagan, told a worker standing near the exit, referring to the 40-inch Sanyo LED TV on her cart. She and her 13-year-old daughter had come for the Samsung Galaxy but hadn’t managed to snag one of the Verizon phones, which disappeared minutes after opening.
– Christina Capecchi
2:02 P.M. |Electronics Sell Well
At a Kmart in Memphis, hours before the sun rose on Black Friday, there was already a return. Alton Hays taped up a box and brought back a wet-dry vacuum he purchased on Thursday. It didn’t have wheels and was missing its wand.
But many other electronic items were still going out the door. Most of the sleep-deprived shoppers were there for the handful of “doorbuster” deals worth some effort, they said: televisions priced at an average $200 off regular price and discounted washers/dryers, telephones and cameras.
Kinson Fant, 37, wanted one of the larger televisions, but the store’s limited stock was already spoken for through tickets passed out earlier. Ms. Fant, who lost her job at Nike’s distribution center in Memphis six days earlier, settled for a 19-inch television for $88.
When Glenda Wallace, a long-haul truck driver, finished her wait in the electronics line — the longest one in the store — she wheeled her shopping cart carrying her 52-inch television she just bought to the opposite end of the store to begin another hour or two wait in the second-longest line – the one for layaways.
She ended up buying one television, receiving a raincheck on a second one and putting a third in layaway all for herself.
Last year, she said, she spent $7,000 on Christmas presents for her family. She’s told them all this year that things will be different. Not because of the economy — just because.
“I’m spending less this year. I sure am,” Ms. Wallace said. “Because, I ain’t buying nobody nothing! You can save a lot of money that way. They got all they needed from me last year.”
Others said they cut back spending for other reasons. “We’re spending less this year because we’ve found better deals,” said 31-year-old Regina Woods, a child care provider, who was in the Kmart electronics line with her husband, 37-year-old Daryl Woods.
– Cindy Wolff
1:47 P.M. |Bargain-Hunting on a Tight Budget
Matt and Veronica Lynagh of Columbus, Ohio, made a series of financial changes after their daughter was born last December that radically changed their approach to Christmas shopping this year.
Veronica, 29, quit her job this year as a director of sales for the Columbus Dispatch newspaper to start her own marketing consulting business so that she could spend more time at home with the baby. They used some of their savings to pay off credit card debt. They refinanced their home, saving them $200 a month. Matt, 30, who works at Jegs, an auto parts supply company, traded his Dodge Ram 1500 Crew Cab pickup for a Mazda 6 SUV, which saved them $250 a month on gas. They also started aggressively putting money into savings.
They also got serious about budgeting. They created a spreadsheet that’s color-coded for income and spending. A few months ago, Veronica used the spreadsheet to set $700 aside to prepare for holiday shopping.
“Our feeling now is to spend, but do it responsibly,” Veronica said.
Another reason for their belt-tightening was political. They both voted for Mitt Romney, largely because they worry about runaway government spending under President Obama. “We’re nervous” about Obama’s re-election, Veronica said. “Our government is spending money we don’t have. Somebody eventually will pay that off, and it will be my daughter.”
So this year, they won’t buy any presents with credit cards. They’ll use their bank cash cards instead. “We don’t put anything on credit anymore,” Matt said.
Meanwhile, they use the same shopping system that they have for years, in which Matt does the bulk of the Black Friday shopping. His strategy is to avoid popular stores like Walmart, where there are often long lines, focusing instead on smaller locations. When he arrives, he finds the nearest uniformed employee, points at a desired item in the store’s Black Friday newspaper ad, and asks, “Where’s this?” He walks briskly to the indicated spot, grabs the gift and heads straight for the cashier.
“I feel it would be really stupid to pay full price this season when all the stores have such good deals,” Matt said.
After using his system at Toys “R” Us and spending $135.02 on gifts for his daughter, he drove to Best Buy, where the line was still wrapped around the building, even though the store had opened at midnight, an hour and a half earlier.
“Forget that,” he said. “I wanted a hard drive for photos, but I’m not going to wait in line for that.”
– Christopher Maag
12:04 P.M. |Protests at Walmarts
3:55 P.M. | Updated
Walmart faced not only a throng of shoppers on Black Friday, but what a union-backed group said was the biggest wave of protests that the retailer has faced. On Thursday night, there were protests at Walmart stores in Miami, Dallas and Milwaukee, part of what the group, OUR Walmart, said would be rallies at 1,000 Walmart stores in 46 states.
In Milwaukee, more than 50 workers and their allies demonstrated outside a Walmart store, and in Kenosha, Wisc., more than 30 did, carrying signs that spelled out, “Respect the Workers.” In Quincy, Mass., two dozen workers and their supporters demonstrated during the night, with an illuminated projection on the store’s outside walls saying, “Massachusetts Supports Walmart Workers Rights,” the labor group said. On Friday morning in the Washington, D.C., area, several hundred people – a combination of Walmart workers and their supporters, many from various labor unions – demonstrated at a series of Walmart stores.
OUR Walmart – its formal name is Organization United for Respect at Walmart – clams several thousand Walmart employees as members and said that many of them would not report to work Friday in what the group says is a strike. The group, which works closely with the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union, said its members were protesting what it said was retaliation by Walmart managers against employees who speak out about their wages, part-time hours and working conditions.
Walmart officials have repeatedly called the protests “a publicity stunt.” The company issued a statement Friday saying that 26 protests had occurred at its stores on Thursday night. “Many of them did not include any Walmart associates,” the company said. It estimated that fewer than 50 Walmart employees had participated in the protests on Thanksgiving evening.
“In fact, this year, roughly the same number of associates missed their scheduled shift as last year,” Bill Simon, the company’s chief executive officer, said in the statement.
Nancy Cleeland, spokeswoman for the National Labor Relations Board, said the labor board would not respond on Friday to a complaint that Walmart filed last week asking for a court injunction to bar the protests.
In a news release issued by OUR Walmart, Colby Harris, a member of the group and a Walmart employee for three years who said he walked off the job in Lancaster, Texas, said, “Our voices are being heard. And thousands of people in our cities and towns and all across the country are joining our calls for change at Walmart.”
Walmart’s 1.4 million employees in the United States are not unionized, and some of them have complained about their wages, lack of rights and the company’s hostile attitude toward any employee support for a union. Walmart has asserted that the protests are yet another union-engineered effort to harass and apply pressure to the company after the United Food and Commercial Workers has repeatedly failed in its efforts to unionize various Walmart stores.
Update:
In what organizers said was one of the biggest protests, more than 500 people — Walmart employees, community backers and some members of the clergy — rallied outside the Walmart store in Paramount, Calif., a Los Angeles suburb. Some of those protesters were arrested after engaging in civil disobedience by blocking Lakewood Boulevard.
Walmart officials said that most of the protesters were not company employees, but rather community supporters, and said some had been bussed from store to store to engage in multiple protests.
Dan Schlademan, one of the protests’ main organizers and the director of Making Change at Wal-Mart, an arm of the food and commercial workers union, said that hundreds of Walmart workers had gone on strike on Friday and engaged in protests across the country. But he acknowledged that most of the demonstrators were community allies, saying they shared the goal of pressing Wal-Mart to improve wages and to stop what they say is widespread retaliation.
– Steven Greenhouse
10:16 A.M. |As Black Friday Goes, So Goes the Economy?
Analysts and investors pay a lot of attention to Black Friday figures and anecdotes, hoping that they will provide some insight into the consumer psyche and by extension the overall economy. Consumer spending, after all, represents about 70 percent of total economic output, and Black Friday is the most hyped shopping day of the year.
But it’s not clear how much Black Friday activity actually tells us about the underlying health of the economy, or even about how much consumers are going to spend in the subsequent few weeks.
“History suggests that strong sales on Black Friday tend to be followed by weak sales over the rest of the holidays and that weak sales on Black Friday tend to be followed by strong sales later on,” Paul Dales, senior United States economist for Capital Economics, wrote in a note to clients, adding that the overall relationship between sales during Thanksgiving week and sales over the entire holiday season is weak.
“This would make sense if people have a fixed amount of cash that they allocate to either Black Friday or the rest of the holidays,” he said. “Good Black Friday sales may then just mean that households have brought forward some of their holiday spending.”
Consumer confidence has been quite strong in the last few months, in any case, suggesting that people may be willing to spend more money over the whole holiday period than they had in the last few years, regardless of how that spending is staggered over the next few weeks.
“We are in a very peculiar situation where corporations, politicians and financial markets all worry a lot about the ‘fiscal cliff,’ whereas households don’t seem to care,” said Torsten Slok, chief international economist at Deutsche Bank Securities, referring to the government budget negotiations.
Consumers may be more optimistic because they believe the value of their homes have bottomed out and so they’re starting to feel wealthier. The job market is firming up, too.
“Obviously, the unemployment rate is not dropping tons, but it’s dropping enough that it’s noteworthy and is making people feel more confident about their jobs and their own situation,” said Alison Paul, vice chairman and United States retail and distribution leader for Deloitte.
The other good news is there are five weekends between Thanksgiving and Christmas this year, which is one more than there has been the last couple of years. “Those are the big shopping days, regardless of how much business the stores are doing during the week,” said Ms. Paul.
– Stephanie Clifford and Catherine Rampell
9:37 A.M. |A Deal’s Not Always a Deal
People come out for Black Friday sales for, among other reasons, the once-a-year deeply discounted bargains. At least, that’s what stores want consumers to expect they’re getting. But smartphones have enabled consumers to get savvier about fact-checking those “bargains.”
Brick-and-mortar stores have responded this year by promising to honor major online competitors’ prices. They want to avoid the encroachment of so-called showrooming — shoppers using the physical locations to see what they may buy on the Internet — onto one of their biggest (and most profitable) shopping days of the year.
“This is one of the more profound changes this year because it really puts the power back into the hands of the folks in the stores,” said Alison Paul, vice chairman and United States retail and distribution leader at Deloitte. “These are the new rules of the road. For years, the store clerks had no authority to do this.”
Best Buy, Target, Fry’s Electronics and Staples have all agreed to price-match with at least some online competitors. Target has even installed free Wi-Fi in every store, according to Bryan Everett, the company’s senior vice president of stores, even though it makes it easier for customers to check competitors’ prices.
“That speaks to our level of confidence in our pricing,” he said. “We’ve worked very hard on our pricing this year to make sure it’s sharp and people can shop with confidence.”
Consumer analysts and advocates recommend putting your smartphone to good use and price-checking, since Black Friday “deals” aren’t always just that.
“About a third of the time it’s not a good deal,” said Mike Fridgen, chief executive of Decide, a price-prediction Web site. “Some are egregious,” he said, citing some offers he has seen for headphones. “That price has risen over the last few weeks as we’ve been getting closer to the holidays, and now they’re discounting it back to a level similar to what it was weeks ago, but not the lowest we’ve seen.”
Another reason brick-and-mortar stores may be slowing the loss of customers to online competitors is that more states have started forcing online retailers to pay sales taxes. That’s chipping away at the pricing edge of some major companies like Amazon.com, according to Nelson Granados, professor at the Graziadio School of Business and Management at Pepperdine University.
– Catherine Rampell
9:14 a.m. |Searching for Significance
On Twitter, some people are wondering what Black Friday sales will mean for the economy and the markets, minutes before they open in New York:
Black Friday feels like election day all over again, this time we are taking exit polls from malls instead of voting areas
— Peter Eller (@Peter_Eller10) 23 Nov 12
8:21 A.M. |Was Black Thursday Good for Retailers?
Early Friday, retail executives were already starting to assess how their decision to start Black Friday well before midnight on Thursday had affected consumer behavior.
Bryan Everett, Target’s senior vice president of stores, said that Target’s decision to open at 9 p.m. on Thursday rather than midnight this year resulted in more families in the store and in customers staying longer.
“Usually it’s just a parent with a child, or mom and dad, or just a single guest in the store,” he said, drawing on his previous 10 years of observing Black Fridays at Target. “This year we were seeing four- to five-person families.”
He said as a consequence, there was more “cross-shopping” this year: in addition to the surge in big-screen LCD TVs, iPads, iPods, DVDs and Xboxes, “we saw a nice pattern of shopping in the apparel and home departments.” Kids’ pajamas, blankets, sheets sets, pillows and scarves all did particularly well.
Mr. Everett did not yet have any specific sales numbers to report, but based on anecdotal reports he said he believed the volume of customers was about the same as last year, while shopping carts were fuller.
– Catherine Rampell
8:09 A.M. |A Civic Duty to Shop After Sandy
It was cold and dark, with the end of Thanksgiving only four hours old, when Ines Wishart awoke, donned a hat and winter’s coat and stood in line under the pale glow of parking lot lights at the Lord & Taylor in Westfield, N.J., for Black Friday.
“We really want to support the downtown and the businesses here after what happened,” said Ms. Wishart, 49, a teacher who lives in Westfield and was without power for a week after Hurricane Sandy.
Around the region, shopping centers and downtowns that had been frozen by the late October hurricane bustled with shoppers during paperboy hours on Friday. Some, like Ms. Wishart, said they came out of a sense of civic duty to help hometown businesses recover revenue. And others, like Genevieve Cece, 33, a homemaker who lives in neighboring Clark, N.J., and lost power for four days, said shopping was a way to put behind them the storm’s bad memories.
“You come out to shop and get back to normal. You’ve got to move forward with your life,” she said, carting a Lord & Taylor bag from the store.
For the majority of Friday’s insomniac consumers, the motivation to stimulate the local economy was far more personal than public. When asked for whom they had gotten up at 4:15 a.m. to shop, Westfield residents Susie Katz, 51, and her daughter Maddie Katz, 17, answered in unison.
“Ourselves,” they said.
A line of perhaps 150 shoppers snaked from the front door of the Westfield Lord & Taylor deep into the parking lot, and when a church bell tolled five times, dozens more ran up to the line from their idling cars. A woman just inside the door handed out coupons worth $20. By 5:15 a.m., the lot was full, save for the parking spots furthest away. Some shoppers sprinted the length of the lot, trailing huffs of vapor that hung like clouds.
“I wanted that extra $20 off,” said Jodi Marvosa, 45, a caterer who lives in Westfield, who bought pajamas, boots and a sweater.
Linda Coleman, who works in education and lives in Westfield, came to the store with her daughter Danielle Coleman, 26, just for the experience.
“It seemed like an adventure. I mean, who gets up at 5 o’clock to shop?” she said. “I’m shocked by how many people are inside.”
Elsewhere, the early Black Friday scene was less manic. At the Hudson Mall in Jersey City, which was closed for weeks because of storm damage, Devlyn Courtier, 21, who works at Hudson County Community College, was the only one in line outside the Game Stop at 4 a.m. He said he woke at 3 a.m. and walked to the mall in order to buy a PlayStation system for his girlfriend.
“I wanted to make sure I was one of the first people here,” he said.
He added that he knew that the mall had been affected by Sandy, but was surprised by its condition.
“You wouldn’t notice it now,” he said. “It looks like nothing happened.”
For some early morning shoppers, the party started Thanksgiving night and just didn’t stop. Brittany Dannunzio and Lindsay Laguna, both 19 of Scotch Plains, drove to Tinton Falls in Monmouth County to shop from 10 p.m. to 2 a.m. Then they spent a couple of hours in a chrome-covered diner and counted down until the Lord & Taylor’s in Westfield opened at 5 a.m.
“I plan on sleeping sometime — I just don’t know when,” Ms. Dannunzio said later, outside the Victoria’s Secret in downtown Westfield.
When the store’s doors unlocked at 6 a.m., the two young women squealed, “It’s open!” and charged inside. Ms. Laguna said that they would soon go to “whatever opens up next.”
For other sleepless shoppers, the morning was more frustrating. Cagla Yavuz, 19, and Yasemin Karamete, 20, of Westfield, spent an anxious night sipping tea and pinching each other to keep from falling asleep only to leave Lord & Taylor empty-handed at 5:15 a.m., grumbling about the crowds.
“Never again,” Ms. Yavuz said. “We didn’t even try anything on. People were pushing and shoving — the lines were ridiculous.”
Ms. Karamete, who had hoped to buy some Ugg boots, said she was now looking forward to shopping on the day after Christmas.
– Nate Schweber
7:50 A.M. |Macy’s Mayhem
Who exactly are all those crazy people who go to Macy’s at midnight for Black Friday?
Turns out a lot of them have been pondering that very question themselves, and finally decided to show up to see what the big deal was.
“We’ve been hearing about this for years in Canada, where we don’t have Black Friday,” said Donna Ward, 48, from just outside Toronto, who was waiting outside the flagship Macy’s at Herald Square around 11:20 p.m. on Thursday. “We came just to see what’s there to see. We want to see the stampedes!”
When the doors opened at precisely midnight, huddled masses of about 11,000 streamed in, according to Jim Sluzewski, a spokesman for Macy’s. They burst in like water at the seams of a leaky ship, gushing in from all nine entrances, running and cheering, with their arms pumping above their heads like marathoners crossing the finishing line.
“Let’s get in front of the cameras!” called Andre Hejazi, 19, from Salt Lake City, as he charged in with his friend Latoya Boender, 23, from Holland, both mugging for the dozens of journalists squatting inside the entrance to capture the mayhem.
The crowd was mostly young again this year, Mr. Sluzewski said. He noted that this was the second year the store opened its doors around midnight instead of a few hours before dawn on Friday. The younger Black Friday clientele may not be unique to Macy’s; a Gallup poll found that more than a third of Americans aged 18-29 planned on shopping on Black Friday this year, compared to just 18 percent of American adults over all.
The Macy’s crowd after midnight was full of foreign tourists – many of those interviewed said they were from Brazil, Canada and Japan – and plenty of college students looking for deals or at least some good stories for their friends.
“We can go all night — we’re in college and we’re used to not sleeping,” said Maricel Zamoras, 22, a senior at Southern Adventist University in Collegedale, Tenn., which brought students to the city on an eight-day field trip to study the sociology and business of New York. Ms. Zamoras and her friend Jessica Anzai, 20, agreed that shopping on Black Friday provided a hearty taste of both subjects.
“I’m looking to see what I can get that’s really good that’s also really, really cheap,” Ms. Zamoras said. “But if I go home empty-handed that’s O.K. too.”
– Catherine Rampell
11:07 p.m. |The Hard Core and the Merely Curious
At 8 p.m. Thursday, as the Times Square Toys “R” Us opened its doors, the line of circular-clutching deal-seekers curled halfway around a city block. The lucky first couple of hundred people in line had been given Santa hats and goodie bags by the store to honor their punctuality and warm their noggins, although the evening temperature was mild.
“We got here early for the iPod and tablets deals,” said Shequel Pearce, 39, holding up tickets she was given by Toys “R” Us staff that guaranteed her these items in case stock ran low. Visiting from Nassau in the Bahamas, she and her family arrived at 4:30 p.m. and were near the very front of the line. “We didn’t come to New York just to shop, but we’re here, so we’re gonna shop,” she said.
Parents farther back grumbled about how long the line was this year compared with last year, when the store opened at 10 p.m., and others peeled crying children away with a promise that they could visit “tomorrow.” Some tourists braved the line just to see what the fuss was about.
“I guess I don’t really have any particular goals for tonight’s shopping, but it seems less nerve-racking to stand in line here than walking through all of that,” said Patrick Tucker, a 24-year-old from Kansas City, motioning to the clogged pedestrian traffic on the sidewalks of Times Square.
Some had been anticipating this sale for months and were in for the long haul.
“We’ll probably spend the whole night at Macy’s after this,” said Iona Rashmi of Manhattan, who said she did the same last year. “I do my shopping for the whole year this night – holidays, birthdays, everything I need to buy for friends and family. The deals are better.”
As when Moses parted the Red Sea, once the doors to the building opened, those in line streamed in swiftly. By about 8:30 p.m. or so, there was no line.
Parents reading lists off of scraps of paper or their smartphones clustered around the Avengers gear, Monster High dolls, Barbies, Legos and scooters. There was a separate line within the store to get into the video game section.
Tina Lee of Manhattan lugged around eight gigantic blue mesh Toys “R” Us bags full of toys and gifts, saying she had been tasked by her coworkers to do all their purchasing since they were stuck working Thursday night and Friday.
“It’s sad I have to be the one to do it, but at least I have the night off,” said Ms. Lee.
Brazilian tourists in particular said they had purposely timed their visit to New York for this long weekend because they had been hearing about this magical American holiday called Black Friday for a couple of years now.
“Tonight I’m going to Old Navy, H&M, Sephora and maybe Apple, but maybe that’s tomorrow,” said Maria Augusta, 33, of São Paulo, Brazil. She bought a package deal for a flight and hotel for around $3,000 just so she could make her purchases at New York prices. “Everything is so expensive in Brazil. They think we’re all millionaires. It is worth it, very worth it, to fly here to shop.”
— Catherine Rampell
8:29 p.m. |Hungry for Deals on Thursday
While some stores made the controversial decision to open on Thanksgiving, consumers were not necessarily buying into the “Black Thursday” rush just yet.
In Midtown Manhattan, a handful of the major chain stores, like Lord & Taylor, Old Navy and Foot Locker, staffed up on Thursday for people who wanted to get an early start. After all, a recent report from the International Council of Shopping Centers and Goldman Sachs estimated that some 41 million people were expected to take advantage of the increased Thanksgiving hours to shop before or after stuffing their faces with turkey and pie.
As of mid- to late afternoon, though, some of the stores were not especially busy.
On the third floor of Old Navy on West 34th Street around 4 p.m., racks of neatly hung children’s fleeces, pants and shirts remained still unmussed by shoppers. In some areas of the store, in fact, the shoppers were nearly outnumbered by polite and cheerful salespeople, who were handing out fliers about Friday’s deals beginning at midnight, 4 a.m., and 8 a.m.
Many of the people who were shopping said they did not come in seeking particular deals. Like Luiz and Sayonara Nascimento of Florianopolis, Brazil, or Maxine and Bill Sauber of Carlisle, Penn., they just happened to wander by and decided to browse.
“The door was open and the music was blasting, so we figured why not?” said Ms. Sauber. She said she was looking around for potential gifts for grandchildren but hadn’t decided whether to buy anything yet.
Likewise, several people interviewed at Lord & Taylor said they had not planned on doing any major shopping. They decided to come in after spotting people toting Lord & Taylor shopping bags in Bryant Park and around the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade route.
“So far the deals aren’t that great,” said Rachel Feldman, 20, of Brooklyn, who was browsing the shoe collection because she said she had some time before going to a friend’s dinner feast. She bought some chocolates at a shop at Bryant Park, but nothing at Lord & Taylor.
Many shoppers congregated around the boots and pumps on display, but other floors of designer clothes and sportswear had very few people milling around at 5:30, an hour and a half before closing time.
There were at least some customers who came on Thursday because they were not able to shop on Friday.
“You know those other stores are losing money by being closed right now,” said Latasha Jones, 46, at Old Navy. She said she finished cooking the night before to give herself time to shop on Thanksgiving since she had work on Friday. “It’s an off-day for a lot of people, and it’s the only time we can shop.”
Once her Thanksgiving dinner in Manhattanville was over, she said, she expected to be back in Midtown for Macy’s midnight opening.
“I’m not going to make it out all night,” she said. “But I need to get some bargains. With this economy, I need to save money just like everybody else.”
— Catherine Rampell
