Black Friday 2011 fever grips area shoppers

As Floyd Deal sat on a bench on the main concourse of Bristol Mall Friday morning – waiting for his wife, Linda Sue, to finish a round of spending at Bath and Body Works – he shook his head and looked at the shopping bags already sitting at his feet.

“I usually wait out in the car when my wife goes shopping on Black Friday,” Deal, of Haysi, Va., said with a laugh. “But even I came inside this year, because I had to get a few things myself, too. So this [Black Friday] has been kind of a different experience.”

Deal was right. Spurred by major store openings that began as early as midnight – while Thursday’s Thanksgiving leftovers were still being put in refrigerators – Black Friday 2011 fever gripped area shoppers in new and different ways.

Walmart’s sales began at 10 p.m. Thanksgiving, while others -- including Target and Best Buy stores across the Tri-Cities – kicked off at midnight. Those hours combined with other major store openings at 3 a.m. and 5 a.m. to create a new group of Black Friday shoppers: those who spent the entire night without a minute of sleep so they could methodically hit every holiday sale between midnight and dawn.

“That’s definitely been the trend,” said a delighted Heather Hill, general manager at Bristol Mall, which saw mobs of shoppers make their way directly from midnight openings at stores in the Exit 7 area to swarm the mall’s Belk’s Department Store, which opened at 3 a.m., and then stay inside to buy at the other mall stores, which all had their doors open by 5 a.m.

“Most people decided to just totally go without sleep, so they could make all the early sales,” Hill said. “And we’ve had lots of people come back after sleeping between 8 and 11 a.m., so they could get the later sales. [Black Friday was] a success, absolutely great.”

Kevin Harmon, general manager at the Kingsport Town Center in Kingsport, Tenn., was equally upbeat about the early Black Friday performance: the mall had 25 stores open at midnight for the first time in its history. The mall drew large crowds for the midnight openings and those folks then stuck around as the “anchor stores” -- Belk’s, J.C. Penney and Sears -- opened from 3 a.m. on.

“At midnight, our crowds exceeded our expectations,” Harmon said. “We expect a good holiday sales season based on our current sales trends.”

Among the shoppers choosing sales over sleep were William and Janice Conyers, of Bristol, Tenn., who made the trek straight from midnight shopping at Exit 7 to various Bristol Mall outlets.

 Janice Conyers said that in a different twist from past Black Fridays, the couple’s two young children, Lydia and Jonathan, had successfully begged their way into tagging along for the shop-fest – only to fall sound asleep on their parents’ shoulders and chests.

“I kept asking them, ‘Are you sure you want to go? You really sure you want to do this?’” she said of her children. “And then, sure enough, they go and fall asleep on me.”

Deal and his wife traveled two hours from Haysi to do early-morning shopping in Bristol. He said he was impressed to find enough sales – on everything from heated blankets to tools – to make the long trip and missed sleep worthwhile.

 “We’ll be back again before Christmas, too,” Deal said. “I’m sure of that.”

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