Sharp elbows: Shoppers scuffle on Black Thursday

A shop­per walks to his car after pur­chas­ing a bike at Wal­mart in But­ler Plaza on Thurs­day, Nov. 24, 2011, in Gainesville, Fla. Wal­mart opened stores on Thurs­day. (AP Photo/Matt Stamey, The Gainesville Sun)

ANNE D’INNOCENZIO, MAE ANDERSON

AP Retail Writers

A shop­per in Los Ange­les pepper-sprayed her com­pe­ti­tion for an Xbox and scuf­fles broke out else­where around the U.S. as bargain-hunters crowded stores in an earlier-than-usual start to the mad­ness known as Black Friday.

For the first time, chains such as Tar­get, Best Buy and Kohl’s opened their doors at mid­night on the most antic­i­pated shop­ping day of the year. Toys R Us opened for the sec­ond straight year on Thanks­giv­ing itself. And some shop­pers arrived with sharp elbows.

Near Muskegon, Mich., a teenage girl was knocked down and stepped on sev­eral times after get­ting caught in the rush to a sale in the elec­tron­ics depart­ment at a Wal­mart. She suf­fered minor injuries.

On Thanks­giv­ing night, a Wal­mart in Los Ange­les brought out a crate of dis­counted Xboxes, and as a crowd waited for the video game play­ers to be unwrapped, a woman fired pep­per spray at the other shop­pers “in order to get an advan­tage,” police said.

Ten peo­ple suf­fered cuts and bruises in the chaos, and 10 oth­ers had minor injuries from the spray, author­i­ties said. The woman got away in the con­fu­sion, and it was not imme­di­ately clear whether she got an Xbox.

On Fri­day morn­ing, police said, two women were injured and a man was charged after a fight broke out at an upstate New York Wal­mart. A man was arrested in a scuf­fle at a jew­elry counter at a Wal­mart in Kissim­mee, Fla.

Wal-Mart Stores, the nation’s biggest retailer, has taken steps in recent years to con­trol its Black Fri­day crowds fol­low­ing the 2008 death of one of its work­ers in a stam­pede of shop­pers. This year, it stag­gered its door-buster deals instead of offer­ing them all at once.

Wal-Mart spokesman Greg Rossiter said Black Fri­day was safe at most of its nearly 4,000 U.S., but there were “a few unfor­tu­nate incidents.”

The inci­dents were attrib­uted to two con­verg­ing Black Fri­day trends: Crowds are get­ting big­ger as stores open ear­lier and stay open later. At the same time, cash-strapped shop­pers are com­pet­ing for deals on a small num­ber of gifts that every­body wants — tablet com­put­ers, TVs and game con­soles like Xbox, Nin­tendo 3S and Wii.

That’s a shift from years past, when there was a wider range of must-have items.

“The more the peo­ple, the more the occur­rences,” said Mar­shal Cohen, chief indus­try ana­lyst with mar­ket research firm The NPD Group.

A record num­ber of shop­pers are expected this week­end to take advan­tage of dis­counts of up to 70 per­cent. For three days start­ing on Black Fri­day, 152 mil­lion peo­ple are expected to shop, either online or in stores, an increase of about 10 per­cent from last year, accord­ing to the National Retail Federation.

Thanks­giv­ing week­end, par­tic­u­larly Black Fri­day, is huge for retail­ers. Over the past six years, Black Fri­day was the biggest sales day of the year, and it is expected to keep that crown this year, though shop­pers seem to be pro­cras­ti­nat­ing more every year, and the fate of the hol­i­day sea­son is increas­ingly com­ing down to the last few days before Christmas.

Last year, the Thanks­giv­ing shop­ping week­end accounted for 12.1 per­cent of over­all hol­i­day sales, accord­ing to Shop­per­Trak, a research firm. Black Fri­day made up about half of that.

Shop­per­Trak is expected to release sales data on Sat­ur­day on how Black Fri­day fared, but a bet­ter pic­ture will emerge when major retail­ers report their Novem­ber sales fig­ures next Thursday.

In addi­tion to open­ing ear­lier than usual this year, some stores offered to match their com­peti­tors’ prices, rolled out lay­away pro­grams or offered more door-buster deals than last year.

Emmanuel Merced and his brother showed up at a Best Buy in New York at 3 p.m. on Wednes­day so they could be the first in line when it opened at mid­night Thurs­day to grab a Sharp 42-inch TV for $199.99, a PlaySta­tion 3 with games for $199.99 and wire­less head­phones for $30.

Merced said he likes camp­ing out for Black Fri­day and fig­ured he saved 50 percent.

“I like the expe­ri­ence of it,” said Merced, who plans to spend $3,000 to $4,000 on gifts this season.

To be sure, not every place was full on Black Fri­day. With so many major stores open­ing at mid­night, many peo­ple stayed up late and shopped early. Then there were those who stuck to their nor­mal rou­tine of going to stores that opened later Fri­day morn­ing. That left a lull in the hours just before and after daybreak.

At a Tar­get on Chicago’s North Side, crowds were light four hours after the store opened at mid­night. And door-buster deals, includ­ing the typ­i­cally quick-to-sell-out TVs and game sys­tems, remained piled up in their boxes. Shop­pers pushed carts through mostly empty aisles while thumb­ing through cir­cu­lars, and employ­ees in Santa hats roamed the store. There was no Christ­mas music — or any music — playing.

Rebecca Carter, a grad­u­ate assis­tant, began Black Fri­day shop­ping at 11 p.m. on Thurs­day and left Tar­get around 4 a.m. car­ry­ing a bag full of pil­lows. Carter said the crowds were notice­ably lighter this year as she and a friend picked up a 32-inch TV for $180 and a lap­top for $198, along with toys and pajamas.

“It’s quiet,” she said. “It was shocking.”

Melody Sny­der of Van­cou­ver, Wash., had braced her­self for anar­chy when she got to Wal­mart at 6 a.m. but was pleas­antly sur­prised when she pulled into the park­ing lot.

“I got here and thought, ‘Where is every­one?’” said Sny­der, who found some Bar­bies and other toys sold out but was still able to find gifts for her three kids.

Posted by AP News on Nov 25 2011. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.