Shoppers cash in on Black Friday deals

And in the last few years, they’ve opened locations on Thanksgiving Day, a once-sacred holiday from retail.

Target on Friday morning said traffic in its stores was “solid” on Thanksgiving, with millions of shoppers filtering into its stores throughout the evening.

Outside, the scene was much the same.

In the past, many shoppers have forfeited Thanksgiving dinner to fearless the cold in hopes of securing super low prices on holiday gifts.

“There’s no one out here!” she said.

“That way he’s watching it in his man cave and not the room I want to be in”, she said. A parade of flat screen television sets in shopping carts rolled out of the Target store in the Wynnefield Heights section of Philadelphia, minutes after doors opened at 6 p.m. on Thanksgiving night. Staples has reversed course and will close on the holiday.

Department store Robinsons and furniture retailer Courts are latching on to the occasion for the second time, following strong sales during the event previous year. For example, take the Verizon Wireless, they are offering great discounts on a range of products, not just the smartphones or tablets.

Black Friday 2015 was nearly a month long, but now it is already nearly time to say good-bye.

The group estimates overall sales for November and December will rise 3.7 percent to $630.5 billion compared with past year. But grabbing those dollars will be tough.

According to the Small Business Saturday Consumer Insights Survey released by the National Federation of Independent Businesses and American Express, supporting local small businesses remains a priority for shoppers nationwide. Unemployment rate has settled into a healthy 5 percent rate, but shoppers still grapple with stagnant wages that are not keeping pace with rising daily costs like rent. Stores also are contending with an increasing shift to researching and buying online.

Many other shoppers stayed home to shop online in an attempt to save money. That reflects the new normal of USA holiday shopping, where stores open up with deals on Thanksgiving Thursday itself, rather than waiting until Black Friday. To see all of the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 deals that are now available take a look at the Cyber Monday sale page on the Amazon website here.

“It was insane, not as insane as I expected, but there were still a lot of folks there up to the wee hours”, she said.

“Thanksgiving should be for family, not for shopping”, Nagy said.

Black Friday sure gets a lot of hype, but when you talk to shoppers, you find that a lot of people would rather avoid it.

For Elizabeth Reese of Whitehall and her sister Michelle Reese of Philadelphia, it had been about 10 years since their last picture with Santa, so they too got in line for a fresh photo. By about an hour before Toys R Us in Times Square opened the line swelled to over 100.

Black Friday is no day for Sunday drivers.

“It’s been pretty calm”, said Alix Bernard, shopping at a Best Buy Friday in Rockledge, Fla., on Friday morning. But she said she doesn’t have a plan. On the bright side, “at least it’s not a total madhouse in here”.

But executives from top retailers including Wal-Mart, Target and J.C. Penney dismiss the chatter about the irrelevance of Black Friday, saying they have worked hard to blend their online operations with the physical stores.