Midnight madness: Sleepless shoppers hit the stores
<p>Tami Degele of Kalispell looks through ShopKo ads as she stands in line early Friday morning. When asked why she came to the midnight store opening, Degele laughed and said she was “just one of the crazies.”</p>
<p>Griff Price of Lethbridge, Alberta, looks intently down the aisles as he makes his way through Kmart in Evergreen early Friday.</p>
<p>Hayley Matthews, right, stands in line with her friend Renata Youngquist as the two take advantage of the midnight Black Friday specials at ShopKo. Matthews lost almost all her belongings — including Christmas presents — in a fire that destroyed her home last week.</p>
Doorbuster deals and earlier-than-usual store openings on Black Friday pushed the “shop till you drop” mantra to a whole new level in the Flathead Valley this year.
To some shoppers, Black Friday is a ritual — a mission — to nab the best deals and whittle down Christmas wish lists. This year, some big-box stores enticed shoppers by starting special sales at 10 p.m. and midnight on Thursday.
Earlier openings meant no sleep for some shoppers. Sara Guckenberg of Kalispell, her sister Wendy Williams and brother-in-law Greg Williams, both of Eureka, started shopping at Walmart where Black Friday deals started at 10 p.m. on Thanksgiving.
The item that brought them out so early?
“An Xbox,” Guckenberg said. The group ended up purchasing Xbox 360 console bundles at Best Buy for $100 off the retail price.
Mission accomplished.
Scott Johnson, a sales assistant at Best Buy, arrived to work at 11:30 p.m. Thursday before the store’s midnight opening. A long line already had formed. Tickets were handed out at the front of the line for limited-quantity items. With a minimum of 10 42-inch Sharp LCD HDTVs per store, the televisions at $199.99 each were a golden ticket deal for Black Friday shoppers.
“The line ended just shy of Target. We were closed Thursday, but I drove by [the store] that morning and saw five tents outside,” Johnson said.
Inside the store, masking-tape arrows pointed customers to registers and different departments designated by color coded balloons made shopping easier for customers.
This was the first year Best Buy opened stores this early, taking Black Friday to a new level.
“I see the deals get better every year,” Johnson said.
By 4:30 a.m., Guckenberg and the Williams’ made their way to Bed Bath and Beyond to check out the sales. They wheeled shopping carts over to a small line that was forming at the door. At 5 a.m. the doors opened and the line of carts moved forward into the brightly lit store.
“Why go to sleep now when it’s time to get up,” Greg Williams said.
Black Friday in Northwest Montana draws lots of shoppers from Canada, such as Jennifer Adams of Sparwood, British Columbia, who makes the trip every year. While Canada does not have a Black Friday, she said they have a similar shopping day on a holiday called Boxing Day.
“Black Friday is better for us to get Christmas shopping done ahead of time because Boxing Day is after Christmas,” Adams said.
Adams also was pulling an all-night shopping excursion to shop for her two young daughters.
“We started at 10 p.m. [Thursday] in Walmart and haven’t slept since,” Adams said around 7 a.m. Friday. She reported Walmart was overcrowded with shoppers.
“You could barely move. It took two hours in line to pay,” Adams said.
By 6:30 a.m. Adams was in Target shopping for toys, with her Christmas shopping nearly completed.
Rich and Colina Johnson of Columbia Falls set out for Walmart even earlier — at 8 p.m. Thursday — to get in line for an Xbox.
“We didn’t go to bed because Walmart opened at 10,” Rich Johnson said.
Even though Colina was one of the first 25 people in line, the game consoles were gone.
“You couldn’t move in there,” she said, adding that some sales items were still wrapped in cellophane for the midnight deals. “Half the store was opening and the other part of the store was wrapped up, so people were getting mad.”
Leaving the store proved to be a difficult maneuver.
“We got stuck in the movie aisle for almost 45 minutes,” Rich Johnson said.
This did not sway the Johnsons from continuing their shopping quest to find another item on their Christmas gift list — electronic tablets. They stopped at three stores and found several at Shopko, then spotted the last one they wanted at Kmart.
Kmart Site Manager Steve Wilson said that store began preparing for Black Friday weeks ago. Kmart kept more traditional Black Friday hours by opening at 5 a.m.
“At 4 a.m. when I got to work, there were well over 100 people in line. At the 5 a.m. opening we had about 350 people in line,” Wilson said.
The big ticket items were also electronics, but an unexpected item that proved to be popular were electronic fireplaces, he said.
“Electronic fireplaces were huge this year; we never had them before,” Wilson said.
The mode in which people use the Internet and smart phones to plan their shopping has changed Black Friday, Wilson said.
“People can shop those [Black Friday] deals online … print out a list, so the husband’s at Kmart picking up items, talking to the wife, who’s over at Walmart picking up items we don’t carry,” Wilson said.
Even with the ability to shop online, devoted Black Friday shoppers continue flocking to actual stores for those “in-store only” deals.
“There are people that live for doing this,” Wilson said.
Reporter Hilary Matheson may be reached at 758-4431 or by email at hmatheson@dailyinterlake.com.