Do You Have The Black Friday Fever?

[caption id="attachment_4856" align="alignleft" width="292" caption="Black Friday"][/caption]

The turkey is done, and the kitchen is clean...what's next on the Thanksgiving tradition? Oh yes, it's time to start shopping. Be sure to check out this article from The New York Times, where they discuss the madness of Black Friday shopping:

Standing at the bottom of an escalator at the Times Square Toys “R” Us at 10 p.m. Thursday, shortly after the retailer opened with its Black Friday deals, Yasmin Santiago and Dexter Valles were trying to fit several boxes into a small hand cart. But the parents of twins hadn’t come for the toys — they had come for the diapers.

“Cheap prices,” Ms. Santiago said, explaining why they had gone shopping after their Thanksgiving meal. The special on diapers, 56 for $10, was better than she had seen at competitors. “Right now I’m on a leave of absence from my job,” she said.

“We have twice the children, and half the income,” Mr. Valles said.

With many stores moving back their opening times for Black Friday deals to Thanksgiving night, some shoppers said they came for the deals, and others to extend their holiday celebrations. A small protest outside of Macy’s Herald Square store urging people not to shop did not seem to faze the crowd that had gathered.

For stores, the Friday after Thanksgiving can be the highest sales day of the year, and is a barometer for what they need to do the rest of the season. With a strong Black Friday, they can generally keep their prices up and assume that their holiday inventory will sell; a weak Friday means they have to start marking down holiday merchandise to get enough of it out the door by Christmas.

At the Herald Square store, Macy’s representatives estimated 9,000 people were waiting outside for its midnight opening, more than in the last couple of years when it opened in the early morning. The crowd appeared to be young, a demographic that Macy’s had hoped to appeal to with the earlier opening.

Kester Richards, 18, was at the front of the line and said he had been waiting for four hours. Mr. Richards said he was a regular Macy’s shopper, and was looking for Ralph Lauren clothes, but had never been to Black Friday before. Kyun Il Bae, 21, and In Jung Choi, 21, both South Korean students studying in New York, said they had heard about the event and wanted to see what it was like. “I just like the atmosphere,” Mr. Bae said. “It’s a popular place, and I heard this is crazy.”

Read more at The New York Times