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Monday, November 24, 2014

( The Black Friday Report ) Patcnews Nov 24, 2014 The Patriot Conservative News Tea Party Network Reports Black Friday © All copyrights reserved By Patcnews












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Black Friday in the U.S. and Europe

Shoppers from London, Glasgow, New York
City and Washington, D.C., took part in Black Friday. The practice of
offering low prices the day after Thanksgiving is spreading across the
Atlantic.

Video by Quynhanh Do on
Publish Date November 28, 2014.

Photo by David Parry/Press Association, via Associated Press.
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Parking
lots at some shopping malls filled up around the country on Friday, as
shoppers kept up the tradition of scouring stores for holiday deals even
though some retailers had been open on Thanksgiving and even overnight.
In
Michigan City, Indiana, the Lighthouse Premium Outlet Mall was open all
night long, providing opportunities for bargain-hunting to shoppers
like Roberto and Robin Martinez. They started at 10 p.m. on Thursday,
and were still going strong at 7 a.m. Friday.
At
the North Face store, Mr. Martinez, 36, was carrying several jackets,
including a $270 winter coat they were snagging for $99 for their
daughter, 17. Mrs. Martinez said their shopping spree picked up basics
for the kids, and would buy other items online later in the week.
In
Boston, the loyal customers of Massachusetts, where Blue Laws bar
retailers from opening on Thanksgiving, waited until 1 a.m. Friday to
start their holiday weekend shopping.








Jennifer
Gomes, 26, of Allston was first in line at Target at the Watertown
Mall. She arrived at 5:30 p.m. and was surprised to find herself at the
head of the line.
“I was like a big kid. I was flying down the street,” she said.
Big
retailers, many of whom kicked off sales Thursday evening, reported
brisk traffic overnight. Walmart said that 22 million shoppers streamed
through stores across the country on Thanksgiving Day, more than the
number of people who visit Disney’s Magic Kingdom in an entire year, the
retail giant pointed out.

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Slide Show|11 Photos

Black Friday and ‘Gray Thursday’ Draw Crowds to Holiday Deals

CreditEduardo Munoz/Reuters

Tablets,
TVs, sheets, children’s apparel and video games were the top five
categories of the night, and Disney Frozen Snow Glow Elsa dolls was a
top-selling toy, Walmart said. Best sellers online were video games,
wireless prepaid phones, high-definition TVs and baby items.
Over
all, about 140 million people are expected to shop in stores or online
this weekend. That is more people than voted in the midterms earlier
this month.
Still, as retailers jump-start their deals earlier and more sales move online, Black Friday itself is starting to fade in importance.
“I’m
not sure there’s anything such as Black Friday anymore,” said Eric
Felton, 54, while shopping at Tyson’s Corner Center in McLean, Va. “The
erosion on Black Friday into Thursday has messed a lot of people up.”
Felton arrived at Tyson’s mall, the region’s largest shopping center
with over 300 specialty stores located in northern Virginia at about 3
a.m., but as the morning began, the shopping center seemed more subdued.
“I
think everyone is avoiding Friday,” said Cindy Leonard who brought her
10-month old to see Santa. Expecting to hit traffic, she arrived early
and and browsed but quickly turned to her smartphone, sighing “I’m
ordering the things on my phone that I couldn’t find in Pottery Barn.”
And
Casey
Brefka, 28, waited in line for Best Buy at Watertown, Mass., said he
had grown up in Ohio, now lived in Allston, and wanted to see how the
Black Friday scenes compared.
“I
got used to the crowds in Ohio, so one of the things is like, ‘Oh, how
many people are going to be here when we pull into the parking lot?’ And
I was kinda disappointed. Like, there weren’t that many.”
Mr.
Brefka, who works for the Department of Public Health, said he did most
of his shopping online. But he showed up around midnight Thursday in
hopes of landing a 50-inch Panasonic LED HDTV for $200 – a deal
available only in store.
Target
said its best-selling goods in store were the Element 40” TV, the Xbox
One, iPads and Nikon’s L330 camera. In the first hour of stores opening,
Target sold 1,800 TVs per minute and 2,000 video games per minute, the
retailer said in a release. Keurig’s K40 brewer and Dyson’s DC50 vacuum
were other top sellers, Target said.




Photo



Amid Black Friday shopping, protesters gathered outside a Walmart store in Washington demanding higher wages for its workers.

Credit
Drew Angerer for The New York Time

Retailers were not providing specific sales figures.
Economists
are closely watching whether retailers can entice shoppers to spend
during what retailers consider the biggest shopping weekend of the year,
especially after a year of lackluster sales so far. A brightening
economic outlook, and ever-cheaper gas prices, are starting to lift
consumer confidence. But there are also signs of lingering wariness
among consumers, after what has been an uneven economic recovery marked
by anemic wage growth, especially for low-income households.
In
Manchester, Iowa, Russell Marriott enlisted a babysitter and
grandmother to watch his two children as he and his wife — both
unemployed — trekked to Walmart at 3 a.m. He spent most of the day
perched at the back corner of the store waiting for the $329 Xbox One
Halo The Master Chief Collection Bundle; she waited in a separate line
for an Xbox controller.
Saving money is important for them, he said, and his wife wanted the game.
“It makes a difference,” Mr. Marriott said.
Stores
are doing their best to get consumers to spend, luring shoppers to
their stores with some eye-popping deals that could increase traffic but
also eat away at thinning profit margins.
The
“doorbuster” deal at Staples is an Asus 11.6-inch Intel laptop priced
at just $100. At Target, the Element 40-inch flat-screen television will
carry a price tag of just $119. And Toys “R” Us is offering a Polaroid
7-inch Android Tablet priced at just $20.
And
online, which makes up a bigger share of holiday sales each year,
retailers have been offering Black Friday deals for many days now,
stretching what was once a one-day shopping frenzy into a week or more
of sales.



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2014 Holiday Gift Guide


The best present ideas, selected by Times experts, to make shopping easy this season.





Online
retailers have also driven the heavier-than-ever discounting this year.
Amazon has priced out many of the country’s biggest retailers in the
big-ticket holiday items, offering a Samsung 55-inch 4K flat-screen
television for $899. Dealnews.com,
which closely tracks Black Friday deals, declared Amazon’s deal “without
a doubt” the cheapest name-brand 4K television it had ever seen.
IBM
Digital Analytics, which tracks online shopping transactions in the
United States, said sales rose 12 percent between midnight and 6 p.m.
Eastern time Thanksgiving Day.
The
National Retail Federation, an industry group, predicts that sales in
November and December, excluding auto, gas and restaurant sales, will
rise 4.1 percent from the same months last year to $616.9 billion. That
is a slightly faster clip compared with the 2013 holiday season, when
sales grew 3.1 percent and made up roughly a fifth of the retail
sector’s annual sales of about $3.2 trillion.
“It’s
been a very tough, challenging retail environment. A lot of retailers
want to get out earlier and win some of those sales before their
competitors do,” said James Russo, senior vice president of global
consumer insights at the New York-based research firm, Nielsen.
“But consumers are now so trained to wait for those aggressive promotions,” Mr. Russo said. “And they will.”
Here are a few more scenes and themes from shoppers around the country:
THE SOCIAL SCENE
But
for scores of young adults and families in lines curled around a corner
in West Hollywood, Calif., shopping on Black Friday is as much a social
outing as it is a bargain hunt.
“It’s
a tradition. I’ve done it since I was a kid,” said Kim Ly, 22, in line
at Best Buy. Ms. Ly, a shoe consultant from Hollywood, was with two
roommates, both of whom said shopping on Black Friday had in recent
years become something of an event.
Ms.
Ly and one roommate, Ashley Gray, 22, said they considered heading out
early for deals an efficient way to start their Christmas shopping,
despite having had their credit cards hacked in a widespread breach last
year.
“As sad as it is, it doesn’t stop me,” Ms. Gray said of shopping on Black Friday, despite the security risk.
“I
feel Black Friday is a fair and safe way to shop,” Ms. Ly said, citing
an in-store purchase as a secure alternative to online shopping.
Amin
Hashemi, 16, and his friends were the first in line to buy a 40-inch
Samsung Smart television for $328, down from $500, and Beats by Dre
headphones for $97, down from $170.
“It’s
not all about the shopping. We enjoy hanging out,” he said, as he also
waited with his grandmother, 60, who is visiting from Iran. “My
grandmother wanted to come earlier to experience this. This is an
experience.”
HOLIDAY SCHEDULES FOR WORKERS
These
are long days for retail workers, some of whom have objected to the
encroachment of open stores on holidays like Thanksgiving while others
express a willingness to work to earn extra pay.
Lenwood
Williams, head of security at the DC USA shopping center, arrived to
ensure orderly lines. He shared a small Thanksgiving feast with his
fellow guards, all of them who had snacked throughout the day while on
break.
He
said this year was the first time the shopping center provided a
Thanksgiving meal for the 16 guards on duty. (Last year, stores did not
open until 9 p.m., so there was no need for it.)
“I chose to be here on Thanksgiving to make sure things ran smoothly,” he said.
TENSIONS IN THE CROWD
And at the Walmart Supercenter in Apopka, an employee helped quell a disturbance among some shoppers waiting in line.
“They
got a little antsy because it wasn’t moving fast enough,” said the
employee, Nykee Harrell, 24, who was making $12 an hour for the shift,
considerably more than his usual $8. “I had to step in and calm that
situation. I’m the extra muscle.”
A
few minutes later, a horde of customers raced to grab DVDs and CDs when
store employees dropped a yellow tape — not unlike a crime-scene
barrier — and allowed the throng to help themselves to the shelves in
that particular section.
“Once you’ve got our item, please move back!” an employee shouted into a megaphone.
“It’s always a bit of a mess when they let them in,” another worker, Tina Toole, said. “They get crazy. It’s ridiculous.”
Brandon
Chapman, a 19-year-old senior at Apopka High School, was able to grab
three DVDs for $4 each, and seemed pleased with the deal. But the crowd,
he said, was a drawback.
“My advice is to get here early and wear body armor,” he said.
THE THRILL OF THE HUNT
Chris
Garity, 43, from Cedar Rapids, Iowa, a county clerk and mother of
three, hit five stores on Thanksgiving evening, went home for a
three-hour nap, then rose at 4 a.m. to jump on her laptop and do some
online shopping (Walmart and Best Buy, the stores she didn’t want to go
to in person). She then snoozed a bit and set her alarm for Menards,
arriving at 6:20 a.m. “I’m tired,” Ms. Garity said. “My eyes burn. Do I
need any of this? No! I could’ve stayed in bed. But this is fun. It’s a
high. I love a good deal. It’s just my wiring.”
Her
cart overflowed with storage bins, four packs of batteries, three
cell-phone charging dock ($25 each), a 1-pound Snickers bar for $8
(normally $10, she said!), car starter kit, even a tub of doggie treats
for her dogs – something for everyone.
As
for shopping in stores versus online, Ms. Garity said she got an
adrenaline rush from being inside a store. “The online is a good thing,
but it doesn’t give you the experience. There’s nobody to share it with.
You push a button and it’s done.”
THE ROAD TO AUSTIN
Roughly
200 shoppers were lined up outside Fry’s Electronics off Mopac
Expressway in far north Austin, Texas, shortly before the electronics
superstore’s scheduled 5 a.m. Black Friday opening, many of them bundled
up against brisk pre-dawn temperatures in the mid- to- upper 40s.
At
the head of the line were four young men who drove from Killeen, about
60 miles north of Austin, on Thanksgiving night get an early start on
the deals.
The
four friends – Cody Comacho, 24, a Killeen movie theater employee,
Christopher Benavides, 21, and Colt Cress, 21, both students at
Killeen’s Central Texas College, and Andrew Thurman of Lampasas, 21, an
employee at a Walmart Store – climbed into a two-door Dodge Challenger
about 10 p.m. Thursday and arrived at Fry’s an hour later, surprised to
find that they were the first to arrive for the Black Friday deals.
“We thought that people would be here already,” said Mr. Camacho.
The
prospective shoppers endured the chilly six-hour wait before the store
opened by operating in shifts, with two staking out their place in line
while two others warmed up inside the car. About two hours after
midnight, Mr. Camacho and Mr. Thurman made a run to a nearby McDonald’s
to pick up 10 McChickens and soft drinks.
The
Black Friday quartet was in the store for about 30 minutes, spending a
total of about $1,100 in cash that Mr. Camacho said the four men had
saved over the last several weeks. They were back in Killeen before 9
a.m., beaming over deals that resulted in markdowns totaling about $600,
Mr. Camacho said. Between them, they came away with a new laptop, an
Xbox, a monitor and other computer components. “I hope to do this again
next year,” he said. “I’ll start saving tomorrow.”
John
Albert Juarez, 32, who describes himself as an entrepreneur, made an
even longer trip from his Central Texas hometown of Seguin, more than 75
miles from Austin, and was outside Fry’s as the line began shuffling
inside the store at 5 a.m. while his 13-year-old daughter and a cousin
slept in their car in the parking lot.
They
arrived in Austin about 6 p.m. Thanksgiving Day and planned to work
through a list of 19 specific stores before returning to Sequin. As he
made the rounds in Fry’s, he said, the out-of-town shoppers had “ten
down, nine to go” and were operating on a budget of about $500. Mr.
Juarez said he calls up “all the stores personally” to find out opening
and closing times for Thanksgiving and Black Friday.
The
goal, he said, is to come away with “just the things we need from day
to day” purchased at a discount of 50 percent off, items ranging from
cologne to gloves to pajamas. He said he also tries to negotiate further
savings with clerks at the check-out counter. His daughter plays
basketball and Mr. Juarez is a bicycling and exercise enthusiast, so
sporting goods stores figured prominently on their shopping hit list.

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