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Black Friday gets a little less frenzied
Black Friday seemed a little less crazy this year
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Black Friday seemed a little less crazy this year.
There were squabbles here and there, and elbows got thrown, but the Friday morning crowds appeared smaller than usual and less frenzied, in part because many Americans took advantage of stores' earlier opening hours to do their shopping on Thanksgiving Day.
That might be hard to stomach for people worried about commercial encroachment on Thanksgiving. But it is good news for bargain-hunters who hate crowds.
Whether it's good news for retailers remains to be seen. Sales estimates for the start of the holiday shopping season will start trickling out later in the weekend.
Stores such as Wal-Mart and Target reported brisk Thanksgiving crowds. The colossal Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota, said it drew 100,000 people between 5 p.m. Thursday and 1 a.m. Friday, nearly what it draws over a typical full day.
On Friday, plenty of shoppers were out, but it wasn't elbow-to-elbow, said Moody's analyst Michael Zucchero, at a mall in northern Connecticut.
"Traffic seems a little light," he said. "Stores being open last night takes away some of the early birds."
Brooklyn residents Paul and Mary Phillips shopped at Target, Old Navy and Marshalls on Friday at the Atlantic Terminal Mall in New York City. They picked DVD box sets for $5, marked down from $45, and speakers for $19, down from $50. They didn't even have to wait in line.
"Because stores were open on Thursday, they're not as crowded now," Paul Phillips said.
There were scattered reports of shopper scuffles and arrests. In addition, protests were planned nationwide over minimum-wage laws and the grand jury decision in Ferguson, Missouri.
Protesters interrupted holiday shopping at major stores around St. Louis to vent their anger over the decision not to indict the police officer who shot and killed Michael Brown.
They temporarily shut down two large malls in suburban St. Louis. At one of those, the Galleria Mall in Richmond Heights, about 10 miles south of Ferguson, at least 200 protesters gathered. Several stores lowered their security doors or locked outside entrances as protests sprawled onto the floor while chanting, "Stop shopping and join the movement."
In Chicago, about 200 people demonstrated near the city's popular Magnificent Mile shopping district, calling on people to boycott Black Friday shopping to show their solidarity with protesters in Ferguson.
Other disruptions: Best Buy's website went down on Friday morning for about an hour, and then for another hour again in the evening. Spokesman Jeff Shelman said "a concentrated spike in mobile traffic" prompted the company to temporarily shut down the site. Online monitoring firm Dynatrace said Cabela's, Foot Locker and J.C. Penney also had website problems.
Online shopping, especially on phones and tablets, may be siphoning off some shoppers from the malls.
IBM, which tracks online sales, said they rose 8 percent compared with Black Friday last year as of 3 p.m. E.T., with much-increased shopping on mobile devices.
In the stores, Toys R Us and Target executives said shoppers seem to be buying more than just the doorbusters and are filling their carts with items not on sale. That's a sign that lower gas prices and an improving job picture are making shoppers more confident about opening their wallets.
