Black Friday: Malls lure buyers, but not too many.
Crowds flock to some malls, while others see fewer customers amid safety measures
Black Friday started off slow in Santa Clara County, but it quickly picked up by 9 a.m. with hundreds or thousands of shoppers flocking to some malls.
Despite warnings from the county that health orders meant to minimize the spread of the coronavirus would be strictly enforced, crowds of people — all appearing to wear masks — arrived at the Great Mall in Milpitas seeking bargains.
Christmas music piped through the mall’s loudspeakers, the cheerful notes a contrast to stark safety measures. Seating areas were sealed off, hand sanitizing stations were everywhere, and some stores with external entrances had blocked off
their inner entrances.
Leonardo Morazan waited in line at the Great Mall’s Nike store with his daughter. He has six grandchildren — five boys and one girl — and wanted gifts for them.
“I knew there wouldn’t be many people here today,” he said.
But the mall was slowly filling up as he spoke. There were more than a dozen shoppers in line behind him inside a mall that had already admitted at least several hundred people in just a few hours.
Nadia Seniuta, manager of the Great Mall, declined to say how many people visited the mall on Friday. But crowds were highly visible, including many laden with purchases who seemed to be in no hurry to leave. Stores like Nike consistently had about 20 people waiting in line in the corridor.
Inder Singh, owner of Noble Luggage, a travel gear store in the Great Mall, said he saw about 40% fewer people pass through his store compared to last year — partly, he guessed, because the pandemic is keeping people at home.
“Nobody’s traveling. Usually, when the mall opens during Black Friday, there’s so much rush, but when we opened up at 6 a.m., there was hardly anybody here,” he said.
Across town at the Eastridge Center, another San Jose mall, some shoppers waited overnight to snag a PlayStation 5 at GameStop. At sunrise, a mall representative emerged, handed out numbered slips of paper and told the shoppers to return a few hours later.
Macy’s workers, meanwhile, were already two hours into their shift. The store opened at 5 a.m. and by 7 a.m., Black Friday shoppers were filtering in at a steady pace.
“As a kid growing up we didn’t have a lot, so Black Friday is always a shopping spree,” said Mayra Ortega, 25, who came to the Macy’s at Eastridge with her partner, Daniel Olivares. Their arms were full of home goods, bedsheets and clothing.
Ortega and Olivares decided to shop on the condition that it wasn’t too crowded. “We thought, ‘We can check and if there’s a lot of people, we can just go home.’”
At Santana Row, an upscale mall in west San Jose, the Black Friday crowds appeared sparse. Around the 10 a.m. opening, shoppers milled on the sidewalks, bought coffee at the outdoor cafes and waited outside to enter shops in the company of a giant camel statue decked out with twinkling lights.
Connie Yi, owner of Boutique Harajuku in Santana Row, said things were “pretty quiet,” but it didn’t surprise her.
“Normally, I have customers waiting outside for Black Friday, but this year, not as much,” she said. “It’s just the pandemic, there’s nothing I can do. You just have to run your business one day at a time. It’s certainly not easy, but you just kind of learn how to survive given the circumstance.”
Officials in Santa Clara County, where daily case counts now often top 400, said they had issued 76 “notices of violation” by noon — many of them to businesses that did not submit and post updated social distancing protocols. The county had said earlier in the week that it would ramp up compliance efforts to ensure Black Friday didn’t become a superspreader event.
“Overall, our team has noted few large crowds thus far,” Michael Balliet, director of community and business engagement, said in a statement.
Santa Clara County, along with five other Bay Area counties, is in the purple tier of the state’s reopening plan. That means all retail businesses, except standalone grocers, are limited to 25% capacity. The county’s compliance inspections are expected to continue through the weekend.
Michael Low, a spokesperson for the Santa Clara County Sheriff ’s Office, said there had been no citations issued on behalf of the sheriff ’s office by 2 p.m. for businesses that were found to be in violation of safety rules like density limits.
Plenty of Black Friday shoppers bought gifts from their computers — a safe strategy, but one that has hurt malls. Some officials, including those in Marin, urged people to shop local.