Chuck Sullick, general manager at Best Buy in the Arena Hub Plaza, made sure the refrigerator and snack shelves in the employee break room were fully stocked so his employees had everything they would need to get through a busy Black Friday. Sullick, of Mountain Top, also ordered food from Cracker Barrel for the staff. Best Buy opened at 5 a.m. Friday and the store was filled with customers all day.
Bill O’Boyle | Times Leader
WILKES-BARRE TWP. — Some Black Friday shoppers go out with a well-thought-out game plans, while others just go from store to store and browse for bargains.
For Andrew Shaw of West Wyoming, the browsing approach worked for him — he landed a 70-inch smart TV at Target for just $400.
“This was totally unexpected,” Shaw said as two Target employees loaded the giant TV into the back of his SUV. ‘We’re going back in — we’re not done shopping yet.”
Jenna Gravish of Bloomsburg and her family were loading the back of their truck Friday morning after having purchased just about everything they said they needed’ at Target in Wilkes-Barre Township.
“This is our first stop,” Gravish said. “But it’s not our last. We’re heading to Bed, Bath & Beyond next and a few other places.”
Gravish said she was shopping for her 12-year-old and others. She said the shelves were stocked with many items people were looking for and she said the check-out lines were not as long as she anticipated.
Several stores said they were busier than last year, but not quite as busy as the pre-pandemic years.
Chuck Sullick, general manager at Best Buy in the Arena Hub Plaza, made sure the refrigerator and snack shelves in the employee break room were fully stocked so his employees had everything they would need to get through a busy Black Friday.
Sullick, of Mountain Top, also ordered food from Cracker Barrel for the staff. Best Buy opened at 5 a.m. Friday and the store was filled with customers all day.
“We seem to be busier today than last year,” Sullick said. “People are buying a lot of big screen TVs, PlayStations, X-boxes, and Apple watches.”
Sullick said about 90 employees were scheduled Friday to fill different shifts. He said his staff was ready to answer all questions from customers and to see they had all the information they needed about every product in the store.
The big screen TVs were stacked in several rows at Best Buy, waiting for shoppers to show up and choose from all the different brands and screen sizes.
One shopper appeared ready to purchase a TV, but kept checking prices online to see if she was getting the most for her dollar. She said she always checks in-store prices and compares them to online prices.
An Associated Press story said retailers were expected to usher in the unofficial start to the holiday shopping season Friday with bigger crowds than last year in a closer step toward normalcy. But the AP story indicated that fallout from the pandemic continued to weigh on businesses and shoppers’ minds.
The AP story said shoppers were expected to pay on average between 5% to 17% more for toys, clothing, appliances, TVs and others purchases on Black Friday this year compared with last year, according to Aurelien Duthoit, senior sector advisor at Allianz Research, with the biggest price increases on TVs.
The AP story noted that while Black Friday has a strong hold on Americans’ imaginations as a day of crazed shopping, it has lost stature over the last decade as stores opened on Thanksgiving and shopping shifted to Amazon and other online retailers. Stores diluted the day’s importance further by advertising Black Friday sales on more and more days, the AP story stated.
In 2020, the crowds were thinner than Black Fridays of years past, thanks in large part to a shift towards online shopping during a massive nationwide spike in COVID-19 cases.
