Dearborn — The festive, get-in-line-at-midnight, near-stampede-level spirit of Black Friday is dead, Metro Detroit shoppers say.
“There was more spirit in it,” said Verizon sales specialist Xavier Ramirez, who mourned the end of the frenzied shopping once synonymous with Black Friday during his shift inside a calm Best Buy in Dearborn.
“Here this morning, we opened up and it was 10-15 customers,” Ramirez added. “Which is still good, but it’s not like it used to be. It used to be lines all around the store.”
Gone are the days when deal lovers cut Thanksgiving short to stand in line for hours at the crack of dawn for steep discounts. Still, Black Friday remains the busiest day of in-person shopping in the United States, according to the Associated Press.
Customers packed luxury shopping mall Somerset Collection in Troy, although most of the crowd left with small bags of merchandise, if any.
The Alderson family was among dozens who lined up outside the LEGO Store at Somerset for a rare sale on the mini brick toys. Their 7-year-old son and 2-year-old daughter happily showed off their respective LEGO finds: a Star Wars stormtrooper set and a kit with flamingo and unicorn pool floaties and a cat.
Rachel Alderson said the couple — who are in their early 40s and grew up hanging out in malls — loves brick-and-mortar stores, and the Columbus, Ohio-area where they’re from doesn’t have any malls that stack up to Somerset. The Aldersons were in town visiting family in Rochester Hills for Thanksgiving.
The two already scooped up “Black Friday” deals on new tires at Costco last week.
For them, going out the day after Thanksgiving is more about getting pictures with Santa and the “buzz of people being excited for the holidays,” Rachel Alderson said as Christmas music played in the background.
“We come for the ambiance, too,” she said. “We like that at least at this time everybody’s in the holiday spirit.”
Plus, several shoppers said, it’s cold outside in Michigan, and what else is there to do?
Detroit resident Shatela Hill, 35, and her fiancé pushed around a shopping cart loaded with a 55-inch television on sale for less than $200 at Walmart in Dearborn. Hill said she has shopped on Black Friday for the past 15 years. This year was disappointing.
“They don’t have the deals they had a couple years before,” she said.
Retailers now spread out deals over several days or weeks leading up to Thanksgiving and offer the same discounts to online shoppers.
That’s how Kavin Chung, who now lives in Chicago but grew up in Troy, usually shops. But the 41-year-old stopped by the Apple store at Somerset to pick up a needed new work phone. After that, he said he planned to walk around “like the grandmas” to get his steps in for the day while waiting for his girlfriend and brother to finish shopping.
“I figured it would be busy, but not like this,” Chung said of Black Friday at Somerset, citing the crowds and “insane” parking. “I’m not sure I would come back in the future knowing how crazy parking was.”
The growth in online sales also has been robust so far this year, AP reported. From Nov. 1 to Nov. 23, U.S. consumers spent $79.7 billion, or 7.5% more than a year earlier, according to web tracking and analysis platform Adobe Analytics. They spent another $6.4 billion online on Thanksgiving Day, a 5.3% increase over last year, while taking advantage of better than expected deals, the firm said.
For some Michigan customers, thinner crowds because of online shopping is a welcome change.
Asianna White, 26, said Dearborn’s Best Buy “made it easy” for her and her fiancé to buy a 65-inch TV Friday. Their old TV broke, and the pair watched the Detroit Lions’ annual Thanksgiving day game on their phones.
“There’s no fights, there’s no huge outbreak,” White said of Friday morning shopping.
But they hit a snag ― the TV was so big, several inches stuck out of the hatchback on the Hyundai Elantra compact sedan the couple drove to pick it up. They said they planned to buy strings to secure it for the ride home.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.