HELLO AND BUY! BUY!
Thanksgiving-sales frenzy across NYC
Big Apple bargain hunters were more starved for sales than stuffing on Thanksgiving, with crowds storming chain stores throughout the city to get a jump on Black Friday bargains.
At the Best Buy near Columbus Circle, Maria Acosta leaned against the store’s dead-bolted double doors at around 2 p.m. Thursday and declared herself “Number 1” in line for the store’s 5 p.m. opening.
“No you’re not,” rival shopper Ali Amar countered. “You’re Number 2!”
It was prime turkey time for most folks. But Acosta, 58, had stuffed her family-size fowl into the oven in her nearby apartment at dawn, telling the kids to bird-sit while she hoofed it over to the electronics outlet.
She’d been outside since 8 a.m. for an in-store-only sale on big-screen TVs.
Nothing was going to come between Acosta and a $199.99 58-inch Insignia television. Not a still-roasting turkey, not Amar — who, she later discovered, is her neighbor — and not her current battle with ovarian cancer, for which she gets chemo treatments once a week.
“I had chemo yesterday. My doctor says to rest,” Acosta told The Post. “I said, ‘Rest? Tomorrow I’m going shopping!’ ”
She laughed and pantomimed passing out. “I have cancer. I’m going to die. But you have to live your life. I want a nice TV. I want a big TV to see it better.”
Meanwhile, at JCPenny at the Queens Center mall in Elmhurst, hundreds of shoppers stood on line, lashed by Thursday’s high winds, in time for the 2 p.m. opening.
They were watched intently by a cadre of NYPD officers, a few store security guards and a man selling premade cotton candy.
“There have been stampedes here in the past,” said one security guard.
The store’s big draw was its $7.99 deals. For that low, low price, shoppers could nab a Black & Decker 4-Slice toaster that’s typically $70.
“I bought an iron for $10 and a pot set for $50. There are very good deals here,” said Nilesh Shah, 46, an accountant from Queens.
“Our family is waiting for us for dinner at their house at 4:30 to 5,” said Patricia Hurtado, as she waited for the mall’s Macy’s to open at 3 p.m.
She had her eye on a deal to score 70 percent off a pair of small diamond earrings with a $50 purchase.
For that, the Queens resident said, Thanksgiving dinner could wait.
“We’re hoping to make it or they’re going to kill us, but these deals are too good to pass up and tomorrow is too crazy to shop,” Hurtado said.
Meanwhile, a family, from Sydney, Australia, was in Manhattan seeking what they understood to be the full American Thanksgiving experience — meaning a few forkfuls of pumpkin pie and turkey between long bouts of shopping.
“We were excited to see that we could shop on Thanksgiving,” said Joshua Aguilan, 20, who was traveling with his aunt and grandmother.
He scored a down jacket from Aeropostale at the Manhattan Mall for just $30.