Black Friday promises shopping deals, and long lines

These days you could get some of those insane deals earlier and beyond Black Friday.

Out shopping in since 2:30 p.m. on Thanksgiving Day, Dubbs wielded her smartphone to execute a specific plan of action that brought her to Home Depot in Hanover at about 6:30 a.m. on Black Friday.

And some, couldn’t be happier. Two years later, however, and something incredible has happened – we seem to have cracked Black Friday. More than 100 million Americans shop on Cyber Monday.

Many Black Friday sales started online on Thanksgiving Day, or even earlier in the week.

Cyber Monday is a marketing term, coined in 2005 created to push shoppers toward online retailers on the Monday after the Thanksgiving holiday.

Looking beyond this weekend, the National Retail Federation projects November and December retail sales – leaving out autos, gasoline and restaurants – will total to almost $656 billion, almost four percent greater than the sum of retail business from the same months a year ago.

President-elect Donald Trump also stepped into the online sales excitement. That would be an increase of more than 11% and the first time online sales have climbed above $3 billion.

Mahesh and Kannan, who are students at the Ohio State University and Centre College, respectively, have been shopping on Black Friday together for about seven years.

Sales in Tulare and Visalia may not be hitting national exceptions, though.

“You know you get bargains and stuff like that when you go online and shop early”, shopper Dawn Williams said.

“If you figure an average of three people per transaction, we’re looking at probably 20,000 people through the building today”, he said, adding that all 175 Menards employees were on staff Friday to handle the rush. She’s finished all of her holiday shopping online, but she and her mother continued their decades-old tradition of spending Black Friday together.

But what may really be helping the record numbers are those shopping online.

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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.

Dubbs enjoys the Black Friday camaraderie and even recalled a time when fellow shoppers broke out into Christmas carols.

“If Amazon had everything, like everything you need in the world, I would buy everything from there”, said Oscar Viral, a 58-year-old chef in NY. “Just came to participate in all the excitement”.

Shoppers flocked to malls, shopping centers and department stores to grab the best deals, but consumers.

Adobe says 56 percent of visits to retail websites on Black Friday were from mobile devices, and 40 percent of sales were made on mobile devices. “We started last night with the Walmart thing”.

“Consumers like to go and shop where there’s deals”. According to Adbusters, a Canadian magazine that promotes Buy Nothing Day, the holiday will be celebrated this year by millions of people in more than 60 countries, including the United Kingdom, Sweden, and Japan.

Fortunately for shoppers Hillary Frego and Faith Lee, the store had plenty of other toys.

People walk through Macy’s Herald Square store in Manhattan, New York, November 26, 2016.

“All my friends were standing near the “Best Buy”. You don’t run the risk of getting to your deal only to find that it’s sold out”, said Tim Conley, an avid Cyber Monday supporter. Cyber Monday is similar to Black Friday, but without long lines and mass crowds of fellow shoppers.

Sears store manager Jessica Hammons said they experienced a similar Thanksgiving rush that tailed off Friday morning. People just turn to their phone, tablets and computers to get the job done.

Most of these initiatives come at a cost, though retailers see them as long-term investments as they seek to build their online link to customers. If you do it online, you save and you can get it delivered right to the house for free.

Cassie Barrett, 26 and her sister Stevie Barett, 21 said they’ve been doing Black Friday shopping for years and couldn’t resist a good discount.

“It’s kind of tradition for us”, Cassie said. “I like to do early shopping”.