Black Friday shoppers hunt for deals – and something to do

Cason joined thousands of area residents who turned out in droves to shop the Black Friday sales – which actually began Thursday evening.

“Some are family but mostly friends, but there is about 10 of us that come”.

The frenzied post-Thanksgiving shopping experience that traditionally draws shoppers out of the house before dawn was in full swing Thursday as people lined up outside local department stores and electronic shops for Black Friday sales.

The frenzied shopping day that is typically marked by a mad rush for doorbuster deals has been replaced by Thanksgiving Day and online shopping. As we keep changing these (shopping) trends, the crowds keep changing. So, I made sure I got out there and got my 11-hundred count.

Shop.org has created CyberMonday.com, which is a centralized hub for advertising all the upcoming websites and deals for Cyber Monday shoppers to enjoy.

The company forecasts that Black Friday online sales will hit $3.05 billion.

There was shoulder-to-shoulder shopping throughout the day. You didn’t need to. He says every dollar shoppers spend online is probably going to be money they won’t spend in stores. During the two-day sale nearly all items online and in stores will be 15 percent off.

In that same vein, Target plans to jump the Cyber Monday gun by offering discounts starting Sunday. It upgraded its price-compare feature, which lets you scan barcodes at physical stores to see if Amazon offers a better bargain.

Like Amazon and Walmart, Target also enticed people to its app this year by offering customers pre-sale deals via its Cartwheel savings application, which resulted in the biggest shopping day ever for new users of the app. Now, the distinctions have lost all meaning. Macy’s dropped it a year ago, and Lundgren said Friday there are no plans to bring it back.

Jackie Tate, a nurse from Manhattan, said that in the past she’d get up in the wee hours to shop the deals on Black Friday.

To Kenny Sun’s surprise, it took him only about one hour or so to buy and return an iPad 4 at a local flagship store of Best Buy, a major US consumer-electronics retailer, in the morning of 2016’s Black Friday, a day used to be frenzy and chaotic for the brick-and-mortar businesses. Consumers, after all, call the shots in this new retail world.

How the holiday sales, whether in physical or digital outlets, translates to retailers’ bottom lines remains to be seen.

You could expect a Thanksgiving dinner and a bit of hanging out afterwards. For some of the kids, some of their board games. A walk around the neighborhood. They bought TVs, Toshiba TVs, 4K. In a few short years, it became tradition. On Thursday, online sales hit almost $1.2 billion, a 13.6% jump compared with past year.

There may be nothing that we can – or need – to do about Cyber Week turning into Cyber Month turning into Cyber Year. Singewald said she was merely the vehicle — “and sometimes the credit card” — as her daughters worked on their shopping lists.

Auto traffic at the Wrentham Village Premium Outlets on Black Friday.