Black Friday shopping subdued
Search for game consoles brings small crowds in Orland Park
Minutes before Target opened in Orland Park at 7 a.m. on Black Friday, Riverdale’s Doris Jones was sixth in a line of about 25 shoppers.
Jones said she has got up early to take advantage of Black Friday deals for more than 20 years. She remembers how crazy things could get when thousands converged on stores and long lines and short fuses caused trouble.
“I was at a Best Buy in Crestwood one year and, Jesus, evidently someone was in line and holding places and this huge dude comes up and the people behind him were angry,” Jones said. “They had to call the police.”
The infant stages of Black Friday 2020 did not have that type of drama in Orland Park. Internet shopping and the COVID-19 pandemic helped keep the earliest shoppers down to close to no one. If it weren’t for Sony’s PlayStation 5 and Microsoft Xbox Series X, who knows how few people would have shown up early for deals?
Flash back to 2003, when the Southtown reported the lines at Best Buy started forming at midnight. The Orland Square mall parking lot was full by 7 a.m.
But at 4:30 a.m. this Black Friday, there were 50 people in line for a 5 a.m. opening at Best Buy, many hoping for a PlayStation or Xbox that Best Buy representatives told the crowd were not in the store.
“We didn’t believe them,” said Randy Montalvo of Blue Island. “But we were still going to wait it out.”
He ended up in the Target line two hours later and there were signs and announcements that there were no PlayStation 5s in that store, either.
As for Orland Park mall, two stores — JC Penney and Macy’s — were scheduled for 5 a.m. openings. Minutes before that there were cars in the parking lot of both stores but no one waiting in line to
get in.
The rest of the mall had a 6 a.m. opening. Minutes before the doors opened, the West entrance had 10 people waiting. That was a bonanza compared to three near the entrance near LensCrafters entrance and zero at the entrance near the H&M.
The days of people spending insane hours waiting for doors to open are not gone, just yet.
At 5:45 a.m., Tinley Park’s Rodney Madison was first in line for the 7 a.m. opening of Orland Park’s GameStop, which had a sign saying there would be two PlayStation 5s at the store.
He said he was there since 3 a.m. But not 3 a.m. Friday, 3 a.m. on Thursday.
Madison, with his eight layers of clothing and his blankets and pillows, spent all of Thanksgiving outside the store on a day the temperature was in the 30s and 40s, bracing for a 28-hour wait.
“The first couple of hours were manageable,” he said. “But after hour 10, it hit me. I had to pace just to keep warm.”
He really wanted this item and spent five hours on a snowy Nov. 12 at Target hoping to get one only to come up short.
“The first person in that line waited 18 hours,” Madison said. “I couldn’t imagine doing that, but now I know how it feels.”
At Target, Jones was hoping to get the coveted PlayStation for her son, Frank Jr. Even if the item was not in the store, she was going tomake themost of it.
“Iwant a laptop aswell,” she said. “I figure I am shopping formy son, Imay as well get something for myself. My husband says I am crazy for getting up early and shopping on Black Friday but I’ve picked up some great items for the family over the years.”
There are stay-at-home advisories in Illinois because of the pandemic and many retailers backed off the doorbuster promotions which caused early mad rushes to the stores and malls. The Tribune, quoting Adobe Analytics, said online sales across the country have jumped up 32% in November with Black Friday promotions that began several days before Thanksgiving.
Tinley Park’s Immacolata Sage was in the Target line hoping to purchase an Xbox X for her son, Noah, and spent her first Black Friday experience looking for it at four stores in the wee hours of themorning.
She was surprised at how calm thingswere.
“There are not too many people,” she said. “Times are bad now and it’s hard. It’s not as crazy as I thought it would be. I would see it on TV and it was crazy. But this is the first year of the COVID. This wasn’t what I was expecting.”