Nearly 136 million shoppers expected for US Black Friday sales

Shoppers didn’t wait for Black Friday to spend.

Bravin Taralkar, of West Des Moines, said he splits his holiday shopping between Black Friday and Cyber Monday. It took eight minutes for all to enter the store.

The biggest surprises the firm found was the decision by the number of retailers to not open at all on Thanksgiving and that some shoppers were buying outerwear, an item that most people think consumers would have already purchased at this point.

“We’ve had a lot of shoppers over night and they’re buying”. The weekend, which includes Thanksgiving, Black Friday, Small Business Saturday and the Sunday yet unclaimed by any interest group, is expected to draw 136 million shoppers to brick-and-mortar stores. Mobile sales made up 37 percent of Thursday’s online sales, which was 20 percent higher than the same day past year. “We got home around 11:30 and then we got up at like 4:30 and then we came here”, said Shannon Stewart, of Penn Hills.

But despite the changing landscape, one thing about Black Friday has stayed the same.

The Green family credits Black Friday’s low prices as the reason they could get everything that they need this holiday season. The NRF said online sales are expected to increase between 6 and 8 percent to as much as $105 billion.

He said their location in the Turtle Creek Mall did well Thanksgiving night when shoppers first began to flood the stores.

Retailers coined the term “Black Friday” many years ago.

She solved that quickly by ordering it on Amazon.com.

Rosales and her daughter started shopping at 4am Friday and showed no sign of stopping.

“The majority of our retailers have the online component, so we really see it as marrying the different ways of meeting the customer’s demands”, said one staffer with the Towson Town Center.

Oak Court Mall kept Thanksgiving hours to a minimum and reopened Black Friday at 6:00 a.m.to welcome a new wave of customers. He declined to give specific numbers.