Walmart took flak for opening on Thanksgiving Day, but initial reports suggest shoppers came in droves.
Shoppers
wait in line for the 8 p.m. opening of the Times Square Toys-R-Us store
in the lead-up to Black Friday, on Thursday, Thanksgiving Day, 2012, in
New York.
You may have even gone online to look at store layouts, which are even available on Google Maps. (Check it out with the store you're in, or click here to see the store then click on the marker and zoom in to see the layout of a Best Buy in Compton, Calif.)
But now that you're standing in line for checkout, does anything look different? Take a look around (that is, if you can see anything with all those 60-inch TVs sitting in people's shopping carts).
You may notice that the store looks less cluttered. Maybe the aisles are wider. That's what stores do when anticipating a rush of customers, such as on Black Friday. They tweak the store's layout.
Here's the tweaking jcpenney has done for Black Friday:
Along with holiday décor incorporating jcpenney’s button campaign, each jcpenney store features a refreshed presentation this season:"We know that the first thing on our customers’ holiday shopping lists is a convenient, hassle-free shopping experience," writes jcpenney spokeswoman Sarah Holland in an e-mail. "Team members throughout the store will be equipped with mobile checkout devices, giving customers a fast and easy way to complete their credit card purchases so that they can spend less time in line. As part of this service, customers also have the option of having their receipt e-mailed to them."
- Racks have less merchandise, are featured side-by-side and have been moved 18 inches away from the aisle, offering a cleaner and less cluttered presentation.
- Color blocking is used across departments to create strong merchandise statements.
- Brands and prices are prominently highlighted while sitting/resting areas have also been added throughout the store.
At Walmart, they "make the flow smoother," says one knowledgeable observer. "They staff up appropriately. There are a lot of people out in the red shirts that are big-event staffs, making sure folks are in line."
Online stores also staff up to anticipate the rush of orders. This year, for example, Amazon is hiring 50,000 seasonal workers to help fulfill customer orders, an Amazon spokeswoman writes in an e-mail.
Of course, all that tweaking doesn't eliminate long lines and delays at the store – or even sometimes online.
Updated Friday 1:55 a.m.
Two minutes before the doors opened on Black Friday at the Walmart store in Framingham, Mass., whoops went up from the hundreds of shoppers waiting in a line that snaked out into the parking lot.
It was that way at Walmart stores across the country.
"WalMart looking like a #Zoo! Every parking spot is full!" tweeted Atlanta resident Antonio Citty Eagle.
"You can't tell that this line wraps around four aisles for a 10:00 PM sale on televisions," tweeted Andrew Grossman of Portland, Ore.
Walmart's controversial strategy of opening at 8 p.m. on Thanksgiving Day in most of its stores around the United States seemed to be paying off. "
It's happened at least once: In 2008, Walmart worker in Valley Stream, N.Y., was crushed to death when some 2,000 early-morning shoppers ripped doors off hinges and surged into the store in search of Black Friday deals. As the Boston Globe reports Thursday, Walmart is still battling the $7,000 fine by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration for the incident.
Still, these incidents tend to be the exception rather than the rule. CBS News posted a rundown of Black Friday injuries in recent years, and most of the perpetrators are robbers, not frenzied shoppers.
Still, tramplings happen. Here's an article from Slate offering advice to those planning to attend Obama's inauguration in 2009 on how not to become a casualty of humankind's herd mentality.
-- Eoin O'Carroll
Updated 10:43 pm
Unlike the term "Black Friday," "Buy Nothing Day" doesn't really need explaining. Started by anti-consumerist activists in the early 1990s and later championed by Adbusters magazine, Buy Nothing Day encourages citizens to "take back" Christmas by publicly cutting up their credit cards, dressing up like zombies and ambling through shopping malls, rolling through stores in a long conga line of empty carts, or simply staying home and enjoying the company of friends and family.
More recently, Buy Nothing Day has been championed by those calling for a "Buy Nothing Chrismas."
"By resisting the impulse to shop for deals on Black Friday we stand at the feet of the retail titans and, with the power of non-cooperation, we challenge the injustices of poor labor conditions, exploitative hiring practices, unfair monopolies, and irresponsible resource extraction," wrote Aiden Enns, the editor of the progressive Christian magazine Geez in an op-ed in the Washington Post last year. Enns encourages Christians to "take a consumer fast" on Black Friday as a way of developing the power to resist temptation.
-- Eoin O'Carroll
Updated 9:33 pm
Chances are, you've heard that despite its ominous sound, the phrase "Black Friday" actually has its origins something positive, namely the first day of the year that retailers operate at a profit, or "in the black."
Like many widely accepted etymologies, this explanation is completely bogus. As linguist Ben Zimmer pointed out last year, the term "Black Friday" originally carried the negative connotations you would expect from such a phrase. One of the earliest known uses came from those worries about the Jacobite rising of 1745, and it was used again to describe the financial panics of 1869 and 1873.
Zimmer cites Bonnie Taylor-Blake, a frequent contributor to the American Dialect Society, who dug up the earliest known use of the phrase to refer to the day after Thanksgiving. It appeared in November 1951 issue of "Factory Management and Maintenance," and it referred to the high level of worker absenteeism on that day.
And last year, in another notorious incident at Walmart, a shopper pepper sprayed her fellow bargain hunters at a Los Angeles store. Apparently, she really wanted that Xbox 360.
Related stories
Still, tramplings happen. Here's an article from Slate offering advice to those planning to attend Obama's inauguration in 2009 on how not to become a casualty of humankind's herd mentality.
-- Eoin O'Carroll
Updated 10:43 pm
Unlike the term "Black Friday," "Buy Nothing Day" doesn't really need explaining. Started by anti-consumerist activists in the early 1990s and later championed by Adbusters magazine, Buy Nothing Day encourages citizens to "take back" Christmas by publicly cutting up their credit cards, dressing up like zombies and ambling through shopping malls, rolling through stores in a long conga line of empty carts, or simply staying home and enjoying the company of friends and family.
More recently, Buy Nothing Day has been championed by those calling for a "Buy Nothing Chrismas."
"By resisting the impulse to shop for deals on Black Friday we stand at the feet of the retail titans and, with the power of non-cooperation, we challenge the injustices of poor labor conditions, exploitative hiring practices, unfair monopolies, and irresponsible resource extraction," wrote Aiden Enns, the editor of the progressive Christian magazine Geez in an op-ed in the Washington Post last year. Enns encourages Christians to "take a consumer fast" on Black Friday as a way of developing the power to resist temptation.
-- Eoin O'Carroll
Updated 9:33 pm
Chances are, you've heard that despite its ominous sound, the phrase "Black Friday" actually has its origins something positive, namely the first day of the year that retailers operate at a profit, or "in the black."
Like many widely accepted etymologies, this explanation is completely bogus. As linguist Ben Zimmer pointed out last year, the term "Black Friday" originally carried the negative connotations you would expect from such a phrase. One of the earliest known uses came from those worries about the Jacobite rising of 1745, and it was used again to describe the financial panics of 1869 and 1873.
Zimmer cites Bonnie Taylor-Blake, a frequent contributor to the American Dialect Society, who dug up the earliest known use of the phrase to refer to the day after Thanksgiving. It appeared in November 1951 issue of "Factory Management and Maintenance," and it referred to the high level of worker absenteeism on that day.
The first known use of "Black Friday" to mean the shopping rush appeared in 1961, and it too was not exactly positive: The term was coined by Philadelphia police officers to describe the chaos and heavy traffic that accompanied the day after Thanksgiving.
Bloomberg's John Tozzi writes that retailers attempted to rename the day "Big Friday," but with little success. The name stuck, and businesses did their best to roll with it by inventing an alternative etymology.
-- Eoin O'Carroll
Updated 8:44 p.m.
For many retailers, Black Friday is kicking off a few hours earlier this year. Kmart, Walmart, ToysRUs, and Sears, for instance, are opening their doors at 8pm, and Target opens at 9pm.
These earlier opening hours are no doubt welcome by some shoppers, particularly the types who are loath to rise at 4am for what is now considered a traditional door buster. But others are questioning the morality of opening stores on Thanksgiving, a day traditionally observed by expressing gratitude for things that one already has, and not by attempting to acquire more stuff.
Resentment of "Grey Thursday" – a term that neatly captures the moral ambivalence resulting from the collision of these two American traditions – is felt most acutely among retail workers, who, unlike potential shoppers, cannot opt to avoid the malls. As the Monitor's Gloria Goodale reported on Wednesday, Walmart, which is not unionized, is experiencing greater than usual pushback from its workers, with many threatening to walk out.
CNN reports that OUR Walmart, a group backed by the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union, expects thousands of workers –"associates" in Wal-speak – to participate in wildcat strikes.
But of course Walmart is simply responding to the logic of the market: if its doors were to remain closed, shoppers would simply migrate to the store's competitors.
As Forbes's Laura Heller puts it: "Thanksgiving or no, the almighty deal will win out. Like it or not."
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