Black Friday is one of the busiest shopping days of the year. According to the National Retail Federation, they expect more than 184 million people will be shopping between Thanksgiving Day and Cyber Monday.
One of the many malls filled with people shopping for gifts to give to friends and family is Destiny USA. Some came to the mall on Black Friday to spend quality time with loved ones.
“It’s like tradition. We come out every year just to see what’s good,” said shopper Micheala Fink. “Just spend some quality time with my mother and sister.”
“Black Friday here is as much of an experience because people come in, they can touch, feel, they have the experience of going in, trying things on and shopping themselves. And so that’s really what sets a day like this apart. And not only that, it’s the memories that are made shopping together. It’s kind of hard to make the memories sitting together on the couch shopping online,” said Destiny USA general manager, Michael Gately.
“Never really done online shopping too much. I like just coming around seeing it. You know, if you see one thing, you might not see something online. It’ll just like get the ideas going,” said shopper Matthew Brown.
Others come to keep tradition alive.
“We like to spend time together and look and browse and, and I always get a really good launch when we’re out and about, and, we just enjoy it. We enjoy coming out and we enjoy the Christmas spirit, and, everybody’s in the mood. So we like to join in,” said shopper Lisa Kratzer. “Twenty-nine years we’ve been doing it. [We] hope we’ll probably do it for maybe 20 more, as long as we can. We may be in our walkers, but we’ll do it.”
This year with a late Thanksgiving, there are five fewer shopping days between Thanksgiving and Christmas.
“Expect a good crowd, especially considering when you look at the holiday season this year, where it’s a much shorter holiday season between Thanksgiving because it’s so late in the holidays,” said Gately.
The National Retail Federation also predicts there will be more than 130 million Black Friday shoppers, with most of them planning to shop in-store. They predict the day with the second highest number of shoppers will be Cyber Monday.