Black Friday’s busy tills take their toll
MBALI Zitha arrived at the Pavilion shopping centre in Durban with her mom and grandmother at 4.30am on Friday, waiting for Checkers to open its doors at 7am.
But the three women were nearly mown down by overly enthusiastic shoppers who tried to muscle their way past them in an attempt to reach the front of the queue.
They were caught up in the manic Black Friday fever that swept South Africa on Friday, with bargain hunters skipping work to brave long queues to cash in on discounts.
Zitha’s granny suffered minor injuries to her leg in the tussle. Despite this, Zitha emerged victorious, five hours later, with a trolley full of groceries worth more than R2 000.
“It was a nightmare,” she said. “I can’t believe how desperate people were to make it to the front. My grandmother hurt her leg. She had to wait in the car while we did the shopping.
“This is my Christmas shopping . . . I won’t be doing this again. But I may look at specials at another mall.”
Retailers went all out for the biggest and busiest shopping day of the year, promising customers the best deals ahead of the festive season.
Packed trolleys hinted that the biggest sellers of the day were washing powder, bigscreen TVs, toilet paper and groceries.
At Game in Rosebank, Johannesburg, a 200m queue snaked through the store to the checkout line.
Black Friday “veteran” Ntswaki Maine said her manager had given her the morning off to shop.
‘‘I love Black Friday, you get PATIENCE NEEDED: Mbali Zitha helps her mother, Patience, with a loaded trolley in Durban QUEUE HERE: Manager Brendon Bezuidenhout calms the crowd at a Makro in Johannesburg
It was a nightmare. I can’t believe how desperate people were to make it to the front. My grandmother hurt her leg
good deals,” she said, her trolley brimming with cleaning products.
In Cape Town, several shoppers lay down on the tiled floors of Canal Walk shopping centre, exhausted from queueing for hours.
Others constructed makeshift chairs to rest on while lining store aisles.
The scenes didn’t match the chaos seen in other parts of the country but the packed mall had a dizzying atmosphere.
Checkers branch manager Wayne Rosenberg said 30 to 50 people had been let inside the store about every 20 minutes to avoid crowding inside the supermarket.
“Previously, people tried to break the doors down.”
Online shopping also proved stressful — heavy web traffic caused sites to crash as shoppers scrambled to book cheap flights.
Takealot’s Janine Pedersen said the biggest sellers were gaming consoles, toys, books, beauty products, hard drives and fitness trackers.
While Black Friday is widely regarded as the start of the Christmas shopping season, financial advisory firm Deloitte, which conducts an annual holiday retail sales consumer survey, said South Africans were expected to spend most of their budgets on necessities this season.
Economist Mike Schüssler is unconvinced that Black Friday or the festive season will yield much at the tills.
“Consumer expenditure in the domestic economy is bleak. Higher consumer inflation is likely to compound the weak domestic economy with real retail sales declining, along with home and car sales,” he predicted.