BY SANDRA GUY and STEFANO ESPOSITO Staff Reporters November 29, 2013 11:24AM
Updated: November 29, 2013 4:04PM
Despite fights and worker protests at Walmart stores nationwide and forecasts of tepid shopper traffic, Chicago-area families flocked to retailers Friday to keep up their holiday shopping traditions.
Experts offered mixed outlooks of this holiday, with shoppers wary of spending and six fewer days between Thanksgiving and Christmas than last year.
South Sider Mark Brown, a U.S. Air Force brigadier general shopping at Macy’s flagship store at 111 N. State St., said his family is spending “a little less” than in past years, but was finding Black Friday bargains while having fun together.
“You can’t get this holiday atmosphere online,” said Brown, who said he does little shopping on the Internet. He and wife Gwen, and sons Mark II and Michael, students at Mississippi State and Missouri State universities, respectively, carried big bags full of gifts.
The Browns are among 23 percent of shoppers nationwide who will spend less this holiday than they did last year, with 20 percent saying they would spend the same, according to Session M, a Boston company that powers a popular apps-based rewards and loyalty program.
Chicago-based shopper tracking firm ShopperTrak predicts the weakest holiday shopping season in four years, while the National Retail Federation expects retail sales to be up 3.9 percent to $602.1 billion during the last two months of the year. That’s higher than last year’s 3.5 percent growth, but below the 6 percent pace seen before the recession.
Analysts expect sales to be generated at the expense of profits as retailers will likely have to do more discounting to get people into stores.
Just before 8 p.m. Thursday, the parking lot at Spring Hill Mall in West Dundee and Carpentersville appeared to be somewhere between a quarter and a third full, with lines of maybe a few hundred or so outside the doors for anchors Carson’s, Kohl’s, Sears and Macy’s and a smaller crowd heading to the Barnes & Noble and to stores inside the mall that decided to open.
Kim Kohls — no relation to the department store chain, she noted — joked she and her sextet were there because daughter Dani wanted a deal on perfume named after the boy band One Direction.
Actually, Kohls said she, family and friends had made it a tradition to come to the early shopping for about 10 years.
“This is wimpy, opening at 8 p.m.,” Kohls said. “We used to line up at 4 a.m. But this is more sane, and it’s a fun thing to do. We’d usually shop until we’d get tired and then go for breakfast.”
The mother and daughter duo from Elgin were shopping with Judy Sundling and her son Alex, and son-in-law Jake Rowoldt and daughter Brittany Rowoldt of Milwaukee.
The group joked that the men were there as “placeholders,” a point demonstrated by Rowoldt as he inquired about a perfume that turned out not to be such a deal while his wife headed to check on $20 boots.
While the Sundlings wandered off to their consumer rounds, the others found bargains on a women’s red blazer, sheets, and a salad tosser before heading to Kohl’s, where they expected it to be more frenzied than the steady, manageable pace found at Macy’s.
Black Friday was a Red Eye Thursday for early birds who lined up at the Evanston Howard Street store on Thanksgiving night.
Shoppers eager to snag one of the two dozen 50-inch flatscreen televisions arrived as early as 3:30 p.m.
Doors at 2209 W. Howard St. opened at 8 p.m. on Thursday.
Michael Parker and his crew were ready.
“It’s amazing. We’re going to have some great sales today,” said Parker, store team leader.
While iPads and game systems were hot items, it was that flatscreen television that many wanted.
With an inventory of 24 of those TVs, Erica Pasik, executive team leader of assets protection, had, well, 24 tickets.
By 7 p.m. Thursday, the line snaked past the pharmacy sign near the east door.
“I’ve got a Golden Ticket,” sang Marissa Rubin of Skokie.
Rubin and mother Susan Rubin, also of Skokie, hugged each other and celebrated when the tickets came their way.
The ticket system helped to avoid a mad rush to the electronics section. Safety was paramount, which is why red Target shopping carts were lined up outdoors as crowd-control barricades. That way, shoppers were separated from street traffic as they waited to enter the west door. No one was allowed to linger on the sidewalk.
Shoppers at the Chicago Premium Outlets mall in Aurora welcomed spending big on Thanksgiving day.
Wenjing Cai, 21, originally from China, had shopping bags of Coach purses. Cai said she wanted to experience the true Thanksgiving holiday, which now includes shopping at the mall.
“This is my first year in America and I just wanted to be part of the festivities,” said Cai, who came from Ames, Iowa, with a friend.
Nikki Paradiso, of Chicago, and her mother waited 45 minutes at the Kate Spade leather handbags store, where they purchased several hundred dollars worth of merchandise.
“For us this is a sport,” Paradiso said of the sales.
The diehard shoppers said their excursion to the mall did not interrupt their Thanksgiving holiday with family earlier in the day.
“We even cooked dinner and everyone went home by the time we left. Our husbands told us to have a good time,” Paradiso said.
“We are going home to rest but we’ll be heading back out at 5 a.m. Friday for a mall in Merrillville,” she said.
By 10 a.m. Friday, the Westfield Shopping Town Fox Valley mall in Aurora was filled with shoppers confident there would still be Black Friday deals.
Don Cullotta, of Naperville, was at Rogers & Hollands Jewelers, where he bought a $4,000 diamond bracelet for his wife.
“I do mind coming out on Black Friday, but because it is for my wife, I am willing to shop. My wife likes nice things,” Cullotta said.
At Sears, Marcia and Robert Suta found an 80-inch flat screen TV on sale for $2,999 that will replace their 15-year-old set.
“We thought it was $4,000 so we saved. I am finally getting my dream TV,” Robert Suta said.
Suta said he recently rewarded his 17-year old daughter with a new car for doing well in school, so Friday he also bought his 11-year old son a 40-inch TV for working hard in school. The Aurora couple said they started Black Friday shopping 15 years ago for the promotions.
“The salesman said they were selling a lot of televisions, maybe the economy is starting to turn around,” Suta said. “We skipped the early morning rush and still got a good deal.”
Meanwhile, 10 protesters blocking an intersection were arrested at 9:30 a.m. Friday outside of the Walmart in the Lakeview neighborhood at 2844 N. Broadway, after they refused to move while demanding more hours and full-time jobs for part-timers who want the work, and a minimum of $25,000 in yearly pay for full-timers.
“The time has come for Walmart to change,” said Myron Bird, a Walmart worker at the Lakeview store who was arrested while participating in the civil disobedience protest.
“That’s why I’m standing up today — for my coworkers, my family and my community,” said Bird, a West Side resident, in a statement.
Walmart released a statement Friday saying it provides “wages on the higher end of the retail average with full-time and part-time associates making, on average, close to $12 an hour.
“The majority of our workforce is full-time, and our average full-time hourly pay is $12.81 an hour,” according to the Walmart statement. “We are also proud of the benefits we offer our associates, including affordable health care, performance-based bonuses, education benefits, and access to a 401(k).”
Meanwhile, fights at various Walmart stores throughout the country became the topic of Twitter traffic. The hashtag #WalmartFights was one of the top-trending search items as shoppers live-tweeted seeing fist fights, bloody noses and other violence among shoppers desperate for Xboxes and other door-buster sales. Walmart issued a statement saying “it’s been the safest Black Friday” for the retailer, and was marred only by isolated incidents.
Shoppers in the suburbs got excited enough to splurg.
At Woodfield Mall in Schamburg on Friday morning, a slumping mountain of bags lay nearby as Kristin Martin and her family sat down, taking a short break after a nine-hour shopping assault.
One of the casualties — Martin’s cousin — dozed peacefully.
“She cooked dinner over at her house last night. So she’s a little tired,” said Martin, a South Sider and veteran Black Friday shopper.
About 15,000 shoppers were at Macy’s Herald Square in New York City right before the doors opened at 8 p.m. Thanksgiving night, estimated Terry Lundgren, CEO, president and chairman of the department store chain. Last year, the store had 11,000 people right before the midnight opening.
Lundgren, who was at the entrance, told The Associated Press that the retailer knew it had to open when it found out other competitors were planning to open on Thanksgiving night. He also said it received positive feedback from its employees. “We’re a competitive group,” he said. “It’s very clear they (the shoppers) want to be here at 8 p.m.”
Kim Groth, store manager at Macy’s on State Street in Chicago, said shoppers were in line to enter the store at the Thanksgiving opening, some wearing matching sweatshirts and others donning antler headgear as part of their fun time together.
Groth had stayed throughout the night and was still excited during at 10 a.m. Friday interview. She said she was operating on too much adrenaline to stop for sleep. Workers had volunteered to get paid time-and-a-half to work Thanksgiving night, and a 20-person crew outfitted in red aprons set out in a group to tidy up and keep merchandise stocked, she said.
Retailers gave no specific numbers, but Walmart and Target reported shoppers out in force for electronics such as the Xbox One and big-screen TVs. Shoppers at Macy’s raced for door-buster deals such as $19.99 boots, $39.99 cashmere sweaters and $9.99 toasters and crock pots.
Hitting the stores on Black Friday is a decades-old tradition for Chris Papp and her family, going back to the days when she, her six sisters and mom would head out for a day of shopping.
While it’s still one of the busiest days of — and the traditional start to — the holiday shopping season, Black Friday is losing a bit of its magic, the Oak Forest woman said at Orland Square mall in Orland Park. While the mall was hectic, it wasn’t nearly as busy as in years past, Papp said, partly because of stores wooing shoppers on Thanksgiving Day with doorbuster deals.
“There’s no normal hustle and bustle like there used to be,” she said. “It’s almost a kind of sadness. We kind of miss that hustle and bustle.”
She and two of her sisters — Gena Sambo, of Oak Forest, and Sandy Demski, Midlothian — and Papp’s daughter, Jamie Carney, of Oak Forest, got to the mall at 7:30 a.m. About an hour later, the four were leisurely sipping cups of coffee and had just one small bag, although Papp had Black Friday ad circulars from mall anchors such as Macy’s and Carson Pirie Scott.
The women said they were in no particular hurry and had a full day of shopping planned. After the mall they said they would scout out the deals at stores such as Old Navy and Barnes & Noble at Orland Park Place shopping center, just south of the mall, then finish the day with dinner around 9:30.
Responding to shoppers’ urge to finish dinner with the family on Thanksgiving then head out to the mall, Orland Square this year opened its doors at 8 p.m. Thursday and remained open until 10 p.m. Friday.
The crowds at Woodfield Mall in Schaumburg had thinned somewhat by mid-morning Friday, but shortly before noon, it was tough to find a good parking spot at the 2.2-million-square-foot mall. It was crazier still Thursday evening when the mall opened at 8 p.m. — four hours earlier than the year before.
“It was monumentally busy,” said David Gott, the mall’s general manager. “The parking lot built and built until about 11 p.m. We hit 95 percent (capacity) in our parking lot, and it stayed that way until about 2 a.m.”
Was it worth the trip?
Alexis Reyes, 30, of Elmwood Park saved $30 on a toy for his toddler daughter, but he couldn’t be sure if he was falling prey to clever marketing.
“We never know — we go as shoppers blinded, hoping to get a deal,” Reyes said.
— Contributing: Mike Danahey, Mike Nolan, Karie Angell Luc and Linda Girardi
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