Black Friday Shopping “Uninspiring” in Brick and Mortar Stores; Shopping

One demonstrator, Frank Chapman, 73, said the video confirms what activists have said for years about Chicago police brutality.

“I won’t do it”, she said, standing in a modest line in advance of Best Buy’s opening on in Duluth on Black Friday. Her daughters used to hold a place at the checkout line with an empty shopping cart as she hand-delivered her finds.

The National Retail Federation (NRF) projects that around 22.3 percent of shoppers will make their purchases on Thanksgiving, which is an improvement of last year’s figures of only 18.3 percent. Take Bintou Cham, who got discounts of 40 to 50 percent at J.C. Penney and other stores in New York City, but was hoping for more.

It was the familiar Black Friday drill: Eager shoppers began queueing in the dark of night, while those who couldn’t wait were able to nail specials that retailers had posted online on Thanksgiving Day. Target said on Friday it had a “strong turnout” in stores on Thanksgiving.

USA shoppers no longer blow the bulk of their holiday budgets on the day after Thanksgiving known as Black Friday. Montoya half-heartedly flipped through a rack of girls’ holiday party dresses and looked down the store’s empty aisles. And Wal-Mart’s Steve Bratspies, chief merchandising officer, said the chain saw more shoppers going back forth between its website and its stores compared with a year. “I don’t think there’s a retail holiday”, she said. The department as well as apparel stores across the country saw “uninspiring” sales on Black Friday.

According to a survey by Barclays, some 77 per cent of United Kingdom retailers are holding Black Friday promotions.

“Our Black Friday occasion was unfathomably prominent a year ago so to guarantee partners have enough time to set up for the occasion this year, we will be shutting every store participating in Black Friday at 12am and reviving them at 5am”, a representative said.

The Centre for Retail Research expects a slightly more modest £966 million online but predicts total Black Friday sales including at bricks and mortar stores will reach £1.39 billion, with shopping over the entire weekend – culminating in Cyber Monday – to hit £3.49 billion. It said, on Thursday the shoppers spent $1.73 billion online which is twenty two percent more than previous year.

But overall, America’s annual Black Friday shopping extravaganza was short on fireworks as US retailers’ discounts failed to draw big crowds, Reuters reported.

Shaquille Simon, a 21 year-old McDonald’s manager, said he bought two TVs online from Tesco at midnight: “I bought one for me and one for my mum. That was bad for customers and bad for the retailers so everything was much smoother this time”.

Mall Del Norte opened it’s doors to shoppers at six p.m. Thursday evening.

Teenagers dominated the Black Friday crowd at the mall in Pleasanton, California.

The rain didn’t stop people from lining up outside the Toys “R” Us in Milwaukee, either.