Shoppers soldier on in changing retail market
Mike Petrisko remembered scanning the newspaper store inserts the day before for big deals, plotting locations to shop, and heading out after midnight on Thanksgiving in search of those special buys.
He still does that. On Friday, outside The Promenade Shops of Saucon Valley, amid raindrops and dark skies, he and son Nick, a Moravian University senior, were heading to stores in search of Christmas gifts.
Mike Petrisko has spent years in information technology, so it’d be understandable if his shopping has shifted to the internet. He said he actually prefers the Black Friday experience.
“I want to get away from that a little bit and be a little more of a traditionalist,” the Warren County, New Jersey, resident said of ordering online.
“It’s better than online and coldly ordering something. You can do that anytime of the year, but this is the time of the year when people are a little bit nicer, with a little bit more interaction, maybe.”
Petrisko is but one shopper, and he and a small sampling of others gave mixed views of why they actually ventured out, from searching for a specific item to getting a reprieve from babies to just wanting to ride around after the Thanksgiving meals, football and other holiday happenings.
The start of this Black Friday seemed slow in the Lehigh Valley, with shopping centers hardly bustling with full parking lots and traffic. Things seemed to pick up when the rain stopped and the sun shone.
Against today’s economic backdrop, the National Retail Federation — the largest retail trade group
— expects holiday sales growth will slow to a range of 6% to 8%, from the blistering 13.5% growth of a year ago. However, these figures, which include online spending, aren’t adjusted for inflation, so real spending could even be down from a year ago.
Adobe Analytics expects online sales to be up 2.5% from Nov. 1 through Dec. 31, a slowdown from the 8.6% pace last year, when shoppers were uncertain about returning to physical stores.
So it appeared people soldiered on to uphold the tradition of Black Friday — shoppers hunting for the best deals at stores. That’s despite recent years of growing cybershopping and consumers more recently being weighed down by inflation. With elevated prices for food, rent, gasoline and other essentials, many people were reluctant to spend unless there was a big sale.
Shoppers interviewed indicated they intended to spend this holiday, which could boost retailers’ fortunes, even if some of those consumers have embraced less-than-traditional shopping such as Black Friday store-hopping.
Dan Brunell of Sayerville, New Jersey, who was at The Promenade with his wife, Meg, said they came in search of good buys. They graduated from Notre Dame High School in Bethlehem Township and recalled spending time walking the sidewalks of the Upper Saucon Township upscale shopping center.
“We came to see what it would be like to shop deals, but definitely, we are huge online shoppers in general,” Dan Brunell said. “And we’re a little shocked at how dead everything is.”
Drew Saunders of Nazareth came out of the Best Buy store in the Southmont shopping center in Bethlehem Township with a computer monitor and lights. The store parking lot was full, and inside traffic picked up within a couple hours, after the rain ended.
“This is actually the first Black Friday I’ve ever been out shopping,” said Saunders, who was with his college friend, Jacob Howe.
Saunders said he purchased his merchandise online and went to the crowded parking lot outside the store to pick up everything. Asked why he didn’t request home delivery, Saunders just smiled, looked over at Howe, who was visiting from California, and said, “It’s fun; it’s giving us something to do.”
Merchants who have dealt with nearly three years of uncertainty by the pandemic, hope more people will follow Saunders’ “something to do” this season.
If you missed Black Friday, there’s Cyber Monday. But before then, consumers have access to Small Businss Saturday and something relatively new this season: Museum Store Sunday. Several Lehigh Valley sites are involved in Museum Store Sunday.