Black Friday - How were the crowds in your neck of the woods?

[Retail Associate]

This was my 10th black Friday in retail and I've never seen anything like what I saw today. I had to be in at 4:30AM. Our sale started at 5AM and by 6AM the store was dead.

Thanksgiving morning was actually busier but it didn't last long either.

[Aethian]

It was like that in my neck of the woods. Streets were packed and then about 10 they were dead and almost empty.

[Chromatix]

Allow me to give a European perspective. Europe doesn't do "Black Friday", so this was just another pre-Xmas shopping day over here.

I walked up to the local bike shop to collect my bike, which was in for winter tyres and a general adjustment. Traffic was fairly light, and the only crowds were at a couple of the bus stops. Bike shop was empty, and the owners took the time to show me the worn brake pads they'd found and replaced.

Then I used the bike to head into the city centre to take care of some financial business. Traffic was heavier when I got closer to the centre, and foot traffic on the main shopping street was heavy enough to get in the way of some of the trams. This takes some doing - usually the trams have very strong rights of way.

But inside the bank, and inside Stockmann (the major department store here), there were no queues. Stockmann were doing brisk business, but everything was running efficiently. There was enough space for me to closely examine some jigsaw puzzles without seriously getting in peoples' way.

[HawaiianShirts]

This was my fourth Black Friday, and I must admit that it was somewhat unusual. We still had a huge line. Some of the people in that line showed up Wednesday evening to wait for the sale to begin. That's right: some people were apparently willing to skip their Thanksgiving dinner in favor of some sale that was only slightly better than our Back-to-School stuff. And, of course, at 4:00 AM, as employees were heading toward the entrance, half the people in line yelled, "Get to the back of the line!" or "No cutting!"

It's when the customers got into the store that things changed. The doorbusters were gone almost instantly. Then people were just waiting in line to check out. If the line-waiters didn't get a doorbuster deal, they were disappointed, but they didn't want to look at anything else. The just bought whatever doorbuster they could get their hands on. So, for the first two hours, everything was relatively easy because I just told people we were out of stuff and watched them stand in line. After about 7:00 AM, it was no worse than a really busy Saturday. It was the people who came in during the daylight hours that bought the most stuff, not the insanely early birds.

The weird part, for me, was some of the late morning shoppers. This was the first Black Friday for me that I had people out doing comparison shopping and price shopping. I talked to dozens of customers who had ads from our competitors in hand. They were very casually wandering back and forth across town to find the best deals. Most of them ended up buying something (we beat most of our competitors' deals this year), but some were dumb enough to think that our sale prices were actually our regular prices and were taking notes about the pricing to come back "in a week or two" for them.

[Irving Patrick Freleigh]

At my store, it was busier in the beginning that it was last year, just because I waited in line 20 minutes to check out with my stuff I picked up after work. Last year I was able to get right to a checkout.

We fell short of sales by about $30K but corporate did not seem concerned and said we got closer to salesplan than many other stores did.