LOS ANGELES — Ashton Caudillo headed out with his father early Friday morning to the Westfield Santa Anita in Arcadia looking for a hard-to-find PlayStation 5 well before the mall’s 7 a.m. opening. What they found surprised them: only a handful of other shoppers.
The 20-year-old’s father, Lawrence, has a distinct memory of Black Fridays past, when hordes of people made the experience less than pleasant, so he wasn’t complaining.
“Black Friday used to be like Disneyland, waiting in line 45 minutes to spend money. I’d rather shoot myself in the foot than do that. So this, this is nice,” the elder Caudillo said with a smile. “I love when there’s not a lot of people around.”
In the most consumptive nation on Earth, Black Friday in the U.S. has long been viewed as the ultimate looking glass, reflecting all that is good, bad and so-so about the world’s largest economy.
This year the message seems to be: Black Friday is not what it used to be. A historic shift to online sales, the lingering pandemic and uncertainty around a long-brewing supply chain crisis is changing how Americans shop.
Around Los Angeles County, foot traffic at malls and stores that have long readied for the consumer assault of Black Friday appeared relatively slow for the biggest shopping day of the year.
There were fewer than 15 people in line at Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza an hour before its 10 a.m. opening, with entire rows of the two-story parking lot still empty when doors swung wide. Crowds were also smaller than usual early Friday morning outside the JCPenney at the Glendale Galleria, a major Black Friday destination, and at Burbank’s Empire Center outdoor mall.
“We’re honestly pretty stunned to see such a minimal turnout. We definitely expected a lot more people to be here that early,” said Elin Markarian, 18, who joined two friends to wait outside the Burbank mall’s Best Buy for four hours before it opened.
They ended up second in a line of fewer than 100 people, barely enough to wrap around the corner of the store.
In Arcadia, business picked up at the Westfield after opening hours, but it wasn’t the door-busting experience mall workers expected. That was a welcome surprise for Hot Topic sales associate Michele Uribe, who said the day felt “like a regular mall day.”
“I work at a grocery store and I just got over working our busiest day of the year,” she said. “This is a little break from being in the crowds.”
The slowdown was not entirely unexpected.
While the National Retail Federation is projecting total holiday retail sales will grow between 8.5% and 10.5% from the same period last year — enough to possibly break all-time records — the figures represent sales in the two full months of November and December.
That reflects the wider window for prime holiday shopping that has emerged since the pandemic. Traditionally, seasonal shopping begins in earnest with Black Friday, but with COVID-19 shuttering stores last year and retailers debuting online bargains earlier, that rush now starts weeks earlier.
Online shopping also continues to siphon people from stores. Internet sales are expected to grow 10% from last year to a record $207 billion in November and December, according to Adobe Analytics
The in-store shopping experience also has been damaged this year by supply-chain bottlenecks that have led to short supplies of merchandise, with many goods out of stock. And the biggest draw of the day — discounts — were largely disappointing, as rising prices driven by inflation at a 30-year high constrained deals.
Meanwhile, newly empowered workers have forced wage hikes, yet many retail jobs remain unfilled. And a string of recent robberies at high-end stores in Northern and Southern California have retail workers on edge.
The Delta coronavirus variant and vaccination resistance, which is filling hospital beds and making in-person shopping potentially risky, also is possibly scaring off risk adverse.
Still, shoppers awaiting doors to open early Friday were happy to be out from behind their computers.
“It’s kind of a return to normalcy for us,” said Christina Perez, in line outside Target at the West Valley Mall in the San Joaquin County city of Tracy. At 6:45 a.m., about 40 people stood awaiting the store’s 7 a.m. opening. “We couldn’t do it the last two years,” Perez said.
She didn’t know what she was out to buy, exactly, and she just wanted to be out with her family. Perez said she had caught COVID-19 twice, and her husband got ill with the virus too. Now fully recovered and vaccinated, the pair was ready to venture out again.
“We just love the interaction,” she said of shopping in person.
Outside Best Buy earlier, around 4:45 a.m., Arturo Zaragoza, 19, sat on the curb halfway down the line of some 30 people. His target: a PlayStation 5 for his little brother, and a MacBook for himself.
Zaragoza wasn’t sure what the exact deal would be for either item, but he said he planned to “buy it regardless.”
“It’s going for the experience. The experience of waiting in line,” he said, laughing. “It’s something to do, I guess.”
Zaragoza said he thought Best Buy’s decision to close Thanksgiving Day, along with some other big retailers, might actually drive less traffic Friday, with people potentially unwilling to get up early after a holiday evening of eating and drinking to rummage the aisles.
Supply chain issues are expected to mar the shopping experience Friday and for the rest of the year even as there are signs the bottleneck in international trade is starting to ease. A full return to normalcy isn’t expected until next year when the current logjam is worked through and factories in China return to full capacity.
“I think this is going to be the first year with a severe backorder,” said Luis Lainez, manager of a T-Mobile store at the West Hollywood Gateway.
Big retailers such as Walmart and Target report they are well stocked for Black Friday and the rest of the shopping season, but smaller retailers without the heft to charter entire ocean freighters are not doing as well.
Retail consultant Britt Beemer, whose firm conducts consumer surveys, thinks that “there is going to be a lot of shock” when buyers find so much merchandise out of stock, and he worries that young consumers used to getting what they want online could really hurt stores.
“The under-30 group is not forgiving at all. Forty-five percent said they they would go on social media and tell all their friends not to shop at that store,” said Beemer, founder and chairman of America’s Research Group.
Of course, the supply shortage is not only a brick-and-mortar disappointment. Online out-of-stock messages have been rising this month and are up 261% compared with November 2019, according to Adobe.
Another chief impediment for retailers and shoppers: a shrinking number of people willing to work in an industry where long hours standing on your feet, dealing with often short-tempered customers, is a given — an experience ratcheted up to 10 on Black Friday.
The Glendale Galleria opened at 9 a.m. Friday, two hours later than last year, at least partially, management said, due to a shortage of workers.
The pandemic prompted many older workers who saw their portfolios fatten during the stock market run-up to retire earlier than planned. Others, with new perspective on life and work, are leaving jobs that were too demanding, while the millions of workers laid off last year en masse adapted to a changing economy.
“People have found various ways to survive, and that includes relying on other family members, dramatically reducing costs, working in the gig economy, picking up spare jobs here and there,” said Kent Wong, director of the UCLA Labor Center. “It means that workers can be a little choosier with regard to what jobs they want to take.”
