U.S. Black Friday Shoppers Chase Deals at Best Buy, Sears

Melanie Devontino wasn’t about to let a deal slip through her hands.

The 26-year-old, shopping at a Wal-Mart Stores Inc. location in Greensboro, North Carolina, began opening a pallet full of Hewlett-Packard Co. printers shortly before 5 a.m. Employees patrolled the aisles around the pallets, so crowded shopping carts couldn’t get by, asking people to put the merchandise back. Devontino ignored them.

“I’m running hard,” said Devontino, who plans to spend $1,500 on holiday gifts, more than triple the amount she spent last year. Other shoppers thronged around her, carrying off digital cameras, desktop computers and other electronics.

Similar scenes played out across the U.S. as Black Friday, the biggest shopping day of the year, got off to its earliest start yet. About 7,000 people waited at 4 a.m. when Macy’s Inc.’s flagship store at Herald Square in New York opened, Chief Executive Officer Terry Lundgren said.

“It’s a steady stream that keeps on coming,” Lundgren told Bloomberg Television. “That’s greater than last year, certainly. We feel very optimistic about how the day has started.”

Shoppers are taking advantage of deals as they face down a slower economic recovery than projected. Retailers view Black Friday -- so named because that’s when many stores become profitable -- as a bellwether for the entire holiday season.

U.S. retailers began dangling Black Friday specials as early as Thanksgiving morning. Stores operated by Hoffman Estates, Illinois-based Sears Holdings Corp. opened at 7 a.m. yesterday. Twenty minutes after the Sears store in Whitehall, Pennsylvania opened, about an equal number of shoppers and sales associates mingled in the electronics department.

Best Buy Lineups

More than 700 people waited for Best Buy’s store to open in New York’s Union Square at 5 a.m. today. Among its doorbuster specials, the world’s largest electronics retailer offered a Sony Corp. Vaio laptop with a built-in Blu-Ray player, Karate Kid disc and carry bag for $500, a 32 percent savings.

Doorbusters demand was strong for computers and televisions and “incredibly strong” for e-readers, Mike Vitelli, Best Buy’s North America president, said by telephone from the store. It’s too early to determine whether business is better than a year ago, he said.

“Consumers are feeling a little bit better,” Vitelli said. “Our store personnel see people in a different frame of mind, interested in shopping and doing the things that give us some happiness.”

Analysts’ estimates for holiday sales vary from little changed to increases of as much as 4.5 percent. The retail federation predicts a gain of 2.3 percent to $447.1 billion after an uptick of 0.4 percent last year and a 3.9 percent drop in 2008.

Spending Rebound

Those forecasts coincided with a rebound in U.S. consumer spending this year as the economy began adding jobs. Consumer spending, which accounts for about 70 percent of the U.S. economy, increased at a 2.8 percent annual rate in the third quarter, according to the Commerce Department. That was the fastest since the final three months of 2006.

Same-store sales, a key indicator because new and closed locations are excluded, rose for 14 straight months through October. Same-store sales for November and December may advance as much as 3.5 percent, the largest increase since 2006, according to the International Council of Shopping Centers.

Black Friday was the largest shopping day in 2009, with $18 billion in sales, according to MasterCard Spending Pulse, which is based in Purchase, New York. That may climb this year since 31 percent of consumers plan to shop that day, up from 26 percent a year earlier, according to the shopping centers group.

Early Start

Still, some preferred the earlier start. Toys “R” Us Inc., the world’s biggest toy retailer, opened at 10 p.m. on Thanksgiving Day with more than 200 doorbusters and free Crayola boxes given out as gifts with purchases.

Lamalia Grant, 44, a boutique store owner from Norfolk, Virginia, arrived at Toys “R” Us in Times Square at 8:30 p.m. with her husband to buy Iron Man and Transformers action figures for their 4-year-old son.

“It beats being outside at 4 o’clock in the morning,” said Grant, leaving the store with more than $200 worth of extra toys she didn’t originally plan to buy. “We don’t mind spoiling ourselves every now and then.”