Black Friday still brings more people into stores than any other day.<\/a> They just aren\u2019t lining up before dawn to scratch and claw after one-day bargains. Merchants now turn their ledgers from debt-red to profit-black over a period of weeks, not a single day.<\/p>\n\u201cI remember back in the day how people lined up for hours before the stores opened,\u201d said Alicia Longacre of Perkiomenville, who had her four sons in tow at the evergreened and tinseled Santa Claus photo area outside the shopping center\u2019s Starbucks.<\/p>\n
It was almost 10 a.m. and even St. Nick hadn\u2019t drawn much of a crowd yet, though Longacre and her boys were accompanied by Kirsten Hillebrand of East Greenville and her three daughters, making a fair crowd themselves.<\/p>\n
Of the young ones, Hillebrand\u2019s 4-year-old seemed to have the most interesting request of St. Nick.<\/p>\n
\u201cI asked for a monkey,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
One presumed she meant a live monkey, but no, she wanted the traditional toy kind, which was surely a relief to her mother and probably to Santa, too. He can promise only so much.<\/p>\n
Just one store in the Upper Saucon Township complex had a line outside: Bath and Body Works. The store has a capacity of 48, so a high-spirited employee named Jenn Hunsicker had to stand outside and let customers in only when others came out.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re out here trying to make it as much fun as we can,\u201d said Hunsicker, who had a basket of candy canes to hand out, along with postcards bearing QR codes people could scan to download the store app with its money-saving enticements.<\/p>\n
What she needed was one of those gas-powered outdoor space heaters, because the temperature was 36 degrees and the wind made it feel like 21 degrees, and the sun might as well not even have been out for all the warmth it was giving.<\/p>\n
Still, die-hards are die-hards.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is one of my routine shopping places,\u201d said Lena Felix of Quakertown, bundled up and waiting her turn. \u201cI\u2019ll get hand soap for the rest of the year, until next Black Friday. I\u2019ll spend most of my money here.\u201d<\/p>\n
A notable number of customers at the Promenade came from south of the Lehigh Valley.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re escaping family,\u201d quipped Rae Kerr of Harleysville, on the first leg of a shopping excursion with friend Kelly Smola of Perkasie. Each carried a bag from L.L. Bean.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s nothing down our way,\u201d Kerr said, lamenting the decline of the Montgomery Mall and other shopping outlets in her area. \u201cWhat we do is drive up Route 309 and work our way back down.\u201d<\/p>\n
Kenneth Kaough, with his wife, Jenny, and daughters Kamryn and Kacie, came to get a phone for Kacie and poke around some of the other stores. The Salisbury Township family didn\u2019t plan to buy much.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ll wait at least a day to do the big stuff,\u201d Kenneth said, meaning they\u2019d put off trips to Target and other big general merchandise stores in hopes the crowds would thin out.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou\u2019ve got all the cyber options,\u201d he added. Black Friday has become \u201cthe exercise day as opposed to the shopping day.\u201d<\/p>\n
It will take time to learn how well stores fared on Black Friday and through the Thanksgiving weekend. Many goods are more expensive this year because of tariffs and stubborn inflation.<\/p>\n
Let\u2019s hope that monkeys, at least, remain affordable.<\/p>\n
Morning Call reporter Daniel Patrick Sheehan can be reached at 610-820-6598 or dsheehan@mcall.com<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"There are worse ways to spend a Black Friday than roaming around Promenade Saucon Valley shortly after the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":47074,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[153,155,154,60,182,436,432],"class_list":{"0":"post-47073","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-bethlehem","8":"tag-bethlehem","9":"tag-bethlehem-headlines","10":"tag-bethlehem-news","11":"tag-business","12":"tag-local-news","13":"tag-retail","14":"tag-top-stories-tmc"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47073","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=47073"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47073\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/47074"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47073"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=47073"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=47073"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}