Black Friday best deal 2019

 Black Friday 2019: A Not-So-Wild Day for American Shoppers

                                                                   Discount tire Black Friday 2019 

Here we are again: Mildly annoyed by the obvious consumerism, but totally in love with the deals. It must be Black Friday.

The Friday after Thanksgiving is still the official start of the holiday shopping season, but things are changing. For starters, Thanksgiving is no longer sacred — shoppers head outside or online to get an early start before the turkey is even cold. And instead of lining up at the crack of dawn after sleeping off their feasts, more people are shopping on their phones. In fact, if you follow the advice of our friends at Wire cutter, you’ll stay home and shop in your P.J.s. (Check out our full breakdown of how Black Friday has changed in recent years.)

Shoppers won’t want for time this year: The gap between Thanksgiving and Christmas — 32 days if you don’t count the holidays themselves — is long (next year it will be just 26 days). That means procrastinators get more time to put things off and retailers get one more shot at luring you in. But beware: Hanukkah is coming on the early side this year.

We’ll be covering it all here, with reporters weighing in from near and far.

Going to the Mall — but Not for the Shopping

Just before 11 a.m. at the Fashion Island mall in Orange County, Calif., the line to see Santa Claus was about 15-people deep, including parents and grandparents. Laura Natalee, who lives nearby, brought her three-year-old son Christopher to see Santa. Asked if the crowds were any larger than a typical Friday, she said: “Not really.”

Others had anticipated more bustle at this palm-and-Christmas-tree-laden outdoor mall near Newport Beach, saying they remembered a bigger post-Thanksgiving rush last year. “It’s emptier than I expected,” said Michelle Gorczyza, who also lives in the area. She did encounter a long line at Anthropology, so she skipped the store, deciding she could just as easily buy online. Her husband Danny said that nowadays people come to the mall more for the food and the experience than the shopping. “You don’t see people running around with 10 bags,” he said. “They’re happy to spend $50 on lunch and just soak in the atmosphere.”

That’s what 28-year old Mitch Williams did on this sunny morning, sitting beneath one of the palm trees. “My grandpa is visiting from Ohio, so we’re having coffee and omelets."

                                                               Apple Black Friday 2019 ad preview

Black Friday Has Lots of Competition

Black Friday, a “holiday” that wasn’t a holiday until it was deemed to be by American retailers a few decades ago, has a remarkably enduring position on the calendar as the year’s most significant celebrations of commercialism.

Retailers start marketing it months in advance. Hordes of shoppers turn out in person and online. Google even programmed it into its calendar as an official holiday. But Black Friday has competition. Lots of it.

Shopping holidays abound. World Fair Trade Day was May 12. Small Business Saturday falls on the Saturday after Thanksgiving. The Monday after that is Cyber Monday — a creation of the not-so-long-ago era when shopping online seemed almost exotic. And Dec. 14 is Free Shipping Day. Those are just the free-for-alls, where all retailers can participate.

Many companies have laid claim to their own corporate holidays. Alibaba’s Singles Day festival on Nov. 11 topped $30 billion in sales. Customers bought more than 100 million products in Amazon’s Prime Day event in July.

There was also over stock tuber, which Overstock.com used to push promotions before rebranding it as Customer Day on Oct. 15 of this year. eBay declared the second Monday of each December to be Green Monday. Way fair had Way Day in April for what it calls “better-than-Black-Friday deals.” Macy’s held a “Black Friday in July” sale over the summer.

“If we’ve seen anything in retail over the last 20, 30 years, it’s that consumers need to be motivated to shop,” said Michael Brown, a partner with A.T. Kearney’s retail practice. “They need to be provoked.”

And not just in the United States. Boxing Day in Britain, which comes after Christmas, has evolved into a day to observe hallowed shopping rituals. In Australia, Click Frenzy in February focuses on online shopping.

                                                                  Black Friday over customer

For anyone above all that crass consumerism? There’s a day for them, too.

The website for Buy Nothing Day urges consumers to “escape the Shopocalypse,” noting that the “anarchy that ensues on Black Friday has now become an absurd dystopian phenomenon.”— Tiffany Hsu

A Strong Start for Retailers

Retailers and analysts said Black Friday 2018 got off to a strong start — and all indications were that it finished strong, too.

Adobe Analytics, reported that as of 8 p.m. Eastern, consumers had already spent about $4.1 billion on Black Friday — a 23 percent increase from the same period last year.

Though the cold weather in the eastern United States may have kept some shoppers home, MasterCard Spending Pulse said that generally “online sales appear to be filling in any weather related soft spots in brick and mortar sales.” The clothing, electronics and interior furnishing sectors were seeing especially good traction, the analysis said.

The upbeat prognosis was supported, at least in part, by photos and videos posted Friday morning on Twitter, which showed long lines and bunches of bundled shoppers gathered at places including a Kohl’s in Mansfield, Mass., and the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minn.

“Stores are busy, there’s good traffic, the queues are manageable and well-staffed, and inventory levels appear to be good for the time of day too,” said Frank Lay, managing director of Kurt Salmon, which is part of Accenture Strategy. “Retailers helped themselves by starting promotions much earlier this year to spread out the holiday shopping traffic and mitigate chaos. Their efforts appear to be paying off.”— Matt Stevens

But There Are Hiccups

Early in the day, J. Crew wrote on Twitter that it was “experiencing some technical difficulties” with its website. The site appeared to be functioning fine soon afterward.

About three hours later, the home page for Lowe’s displayed a message that it was undergoing maintenance. The site was soon restored.

Still, analysts monitoring Black Friday said online sales were chugging along, driven in part by the cold, wet weather in some parts of the country, which they said may have nudged some shoppers away from stores and toward their computers or smartphones.— Matt Stevens

What to Buy: A Cheat Sheet

Feeling overwhelmed by deals? You’re not alone. In the hope of clearing out inventory, retailers bombard us with thousands of items that are marked on sale. Many of these products are of subpar quality, or they aren’t actually on sale at all. We wrote a cheat sheet of the types of products that are hot — and the ones that are not — on Black Friday to help you home in on the quality, deeply discounted goods.

Here’s the upshot: Black Friday is a great time to buy a new video game console, a television, headphones or a smart home product like the Amazon Echo or Google Home. One of the most notable deals we’ve seen: Best Buy, Amazon and many retailers are selling Sony’s PlayStation 4 with a new Spider-Man game for $200, down from the normal price of $300 for the console alone. So come prepared: Jot down a list of things you’d like to buy in those categories and look out for price drops. —  Brian X. Chen

You Look Hungry for More

You clearly have an insatiable appetite for The Times’ Black Friday coverage! Here are a few recent stories you might enjoy about this very American “holiday” and how it fits into the broader economy.

• Some stores haven’t embraced the Black Friday madness. Among the holdouts: Dunham’s department store in rural Pennsylvania. Michael Cookery recently visited to learn why it doesn’t participate in Black Friday.

• F.A.O. Schwarz — the iconic but then shuttered toy store — is back, under new management: private equity. The new business model involves outposts in airports and “stores within stores” at larger retailers.

  

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Hey Hey, Ho Ho, Black Friday Has Got to Go

Believe it or not, not everyone is a fan of Black Friday.

REI, the outdoor equipment retailer, has generated headlines every year since 2015 when it first said it would not open the day after Thanksgiving. Instead, REI urged people to spend time with friends and family in nature, with the hashtag #Opt Outside.

This year will be no different. Even as major retailers plan to promote blockbuster sales, labour groups like Occupy New Hampshire Sea Coast say they will be staging protests in front of stores to draw attention to employment issues.

“We’re fighting for respect and a fair wage at work,” David Holt, one of the organizers of the demonstration, said in an interview on Wednesday. He added that Black Friday was an especially appealing time for labour movements to organize. “One of the things this Black Friday protest is about is consumerism.”

Mr Holt said he hoped that holding the demonstration in front of a Walmart would encourage shoppers to think about labour conditions for the store’s employees.— Zach Wichter

When Bargains Become a Tradition

There are three reasons that Black Friday is so popular, and two of them are the deals, according to Tulin Erdem, a marketing professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business.

“The economic savings, feeling good about yourself having found a good deal, being a shrewd consumer,” she said, all add up to one key factor. Plus, because so many stores offer Black Friday sales, it’s easier to find discounts without having to search as hard as you might during the rest of the year.

But, Dr. Erdem said, another the reason Black Friday remains so popular is a tradition.

“It still has its appeal because of this ritualistic aspect,” she said. “It’s like going to a big important baseball game or Super Bowl as an American family.”

[See how one family spent their Black Friday last year.]

Consider that the National Retail Federation surveyed 7,516 consumers about their shopping plans this year, and 26 percent of those who planned to shop on Black Friday said it was because of tradition. An additional 23 percent said they would shop because it’s just something to do. (As far as we know, nobody was asked whether they’re shopping just to get away from family members.) Of course Black Friday is just the start of things. If retailers don’t start discounting before Thanksgiving — and most seem to — they are certainly using the holiday shopping season to push merchandise at every turn. The biggest discounts tend to come on “Super Saturday” — the last Saturday before Christmas, said Craig Johnson, president of Customer Growth Partners, a retail analysis firm. But Black Friday does matter. Consumers surveyed by the retail federation said they planned to shop more on Black Friday than on any other day of the Thanksgiving weekend. And Black Friday maintains cultural cache, especially for “new Americans,” said Mr. Johnson, as recent immigrants are more likely to take part. “That’s how you learn to be an American consumer, by showing up and shopping on Black Friday.”— Zach Wichter

A version of this article appears in print on oct. 28, 2019, Section B, Page 5 of the New York edition with the headline: A Modest Horde of Savvy Shoppers Descends Again for Black Friday. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe .