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Black Friday Is Busy, but Are Holiday Shoppers Spending?

Marcus Yam for The New York Times

Black Friday shoppers filled the main concourse at Macy's shortly after it opened at midnight on Friday. 

Some holiday shoppers were on alert Friday after hearing about an incident where a Wal-Mart customer in Los Angeles pepper-sprayed rival shoppers who were trying to grab discounted electron

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Marcus Yam for The New York Times

Black Friday shoppers poured into Macy's in New York at midnight on Friday. 

But shopping in most of the nation was calm, if busy. Erika Endler, 42, of La Puente, Calif., was at a Bass Pro Shops outside of Los Angeles to pick up $10 Levi’s, fishing weights and ammunition, and she was grateful for the lack of frenzy there.
“You’ve got people being pepper-sprayed at Wal-Mart, and here they sell guns, and everyone is civil,” she said.
As Ms. Endler’s trip for cheap jeans suggested, the economy was a big reason shoppers headed to stores.
“We drove 70 miles and stood in 40-degree weather for $10 flannel jackets," said Steven Salkeld, a delivery driver from Castaic, Calif., who had arrived at midnight to wait in line for Bass’s 6 a.m. opening. He, his twin brother and four friends, all of them fishermen, were warming themselves with a propane heater.
In addition to discounts, several retailers were offering layaway as a new option this year, allowing people to pay for purchases over time.
At Sears and Kmart, which have long offered a layaway service, more people were using it this Thanksgiving and Black Friday versus a year ago, a spokesman Tom Aiello, said. “Layaway really picked up yesterday,” he said on Friday.
And while standard gifts like toys and electronics were selling briskly, so were some staples.
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.
While the diapers sale got “a great response,” according to a Toys “R” Us spokeswoman, Jennifer Albano, some more expensive, and heavily promoted, items remained on shelves hours after retailers had opened.
Eight hours after the midnight opening, two first-time Black Friday shoppers at a Target store in East Hanover, N.J., said they were surprised by how thin the crowds were.
“We got here at 8, and the only thing that wasn’t left was a television we might have wanted,” said Lisa Berk, a consultant from Livingston, N.J., who was shopping for Hanukkah gifts with her daughter. At a little before 9 a.m., they were headed for the checkout, having secured an Xbox 360 console for $139 and a Kitchen Aid mixer for $199. “There were quite a few Xboxes still on the shelves,” Ms. Berk said. “You didn’t have to wake up early to get all of the deals.”
With many stores moving back their opening times for Black Friday to Thanksgiving night, some shoppers came for the deals and others to extend their holiday celebrations. A small protest outside of Macy’s Herald Square store in New York 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.
Many first-time Black Friday shoppers in downtown Chicago, who had headed out late on Thanksgiving night, said the deals wouldn’t have been worth it if they meant waking up before sunrise on Friday.
“I would have been dead to the world at 4 a.m.,” said Lowanda Lynch, 51, who waited in her car as her daughter stood in line eyeing a Westinghouse 46-inch television. “Ain’t no way I would get up at that hour.”
Blocks away at Best Buy, where a small group of Occupy Chicago protesters heckled customers about consumerism, a neighborhood resident, Ellie Fox, 72, said the midnight start drove her to quell her years of curiosity about Black Friday.
“It was on my bucket list,” said Ms. Fox, who was had hoped to get a Samsung 15.6-inch laptop for $299.99. “I’m just a old woman looking for a good deal.”