Shoppers still flock for Black Friday deals
NEW YORK — Retailers worked hard to attract shoppers to stores on Black Friday, offering inperson deals meant to counter the ease of shopping by phone on Amazon.
A better economy and colder weather helped, to be sure. But stores have also tried to improve the store experience and offer better service.
They’ve also made a big push toward offering store pickup for online orders, hoping to get people to pick up more items. But they’re fighting a circumstance in which online leader Amazon is the first and only stop for many shoppers.
So they’re getting creative with the deals.
Victor Moore said he arrived about two hours ahead of Best Buy’s 8 a.m. opening in Nashville and scored one of the 14 “doorbuster” deals on a 55-inch Toshiba smart TV for $280, a $220 savings.
Moore said he’s done some online shopping, but the allure of in-store-only deals drew him out from behind the computer.
“This is the first successful doorbuster that I’ve ever been a part of,” Moore said. “I’ve been in lines before, but never actually got the items that I was waiting for.”
Annette Peluffo usually avoids Black Friday and buys online. But a $250 gift card reward for buying an iPhone 8 plus at a Target store in Miami was hard to resist. She plans to use the money to buy toys for her nephews and nieces in the coming weeks. “I just came here for the iPhone. I am not going to any other store,” she said.
Still, Black Friday isn’t what it used to be. It has morphed from a single day when people got up early to score doorbusters into a whole month of deals. That has
Pistorius’ sentence increased to 13 years, 5 months
SOMERSET WEST, South Africa — Oscar Pistorius’ prison sentence was more than doubled to 13 years and five months on Friday, a surprisingly dramatic intervention by South Africa’s Supreme Court of Appeal in the Olympic athlete’s fate after the murder of girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp.
A panel of judges unanimously upheld an appeal by prosecutors against Pistorius’ original six-year sentence for shooting Steenkamp multiple times in his home in 2013. Under that initial sentence, which the court called “shockingly lenient,” the double-amputee runner could have been released on parole in mid-2019. thinned out the crowds. And brickand-mortar stores face plenty of challenges.
About 69 per cent of Americans, or 164 million people, intend to shop at some point during the five-day period from Thanksgiving to Cyber Monday, according to a survey. It expected Black Friday to remain the busiest day, with about 115 million people planning to shop then.
“The consumer still likes to go to the stores,” said Charles O’Shea, Moody’s lead retail analyst. Now, the earliest he’ll be eligible for parole is 2023. The ruling could finally bring an end to the near five-year legal saga surrounding Pistorius, a multiple Paralympic champion and record-breaker who was the first amputee to run at the Olympics and one of the most celebrated sportsmen in the world.
Pistorius killed Steenkamp in the pre-dawn hours of Valentine’s Day 2013 after shooting four times through a closed toilet cubicle door with his 9 mm pistol. He claimed he mistook the 29-year-old model and reality TV star for an intruder and was initially convicted of manslaughter by trial judge Thokozile Masipa. That conviction was overturned and replaced with a murder conviction by the Supreme Court in 2015. Pistorius was then sentenced to six years for murder by Masipa, a decision also now rejected by the Supreme Court.
Pistorius, who turned 31 on Wednesday, is jailed near the South African capital of Pretoria.