Note to the love-struck couple making out in the crosswalk and clogging pedestrian traffic at the corner of Erie and Michigan: Shoppers hate you.
Note to the woman putting a Band-Aid on her blistering left heel directly in front of a backed-up escalator at the State Street Marshall Field’s: Shoppers hate you.
Note to the mother getting into a three-minute shouting match with her cranky daughter smack-dab in the middle of one of the busiest walkways in Water Tower Place: Shoppers hate you.
“I’m going insane,” grumbled Randall James, 42, of Naperville, as he tried to shove his way through the sidewalk gridlock outside Saks Fifth Avenue on North Michigan Avenue. “It’s like some people don’t even realize there are other people trying to work around them.”
Things were definitely tense out there on Friday, the traditional start of the holiday shopping season, as millions of people took to the malls and stores around Chicago and the country.
Whether you hit the shops at 4:30 a.m. like some Pokemon devotees in Gurnee Mills or sometime around 10 a.m. like many bag-laden people trudging up the Magnificent Mile, shopping etiquette had been tossed out the window well before noon. People everywhere were openly grumbling and cursing the masses.
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It wasn’t that people were dying to be rude to the people around them. But there were plenty of insanity-inspiring situations at the area’s mobbed malls and bustling boutiques:
There were the people who waited 25 minutes in an impatient line to pay for their purchase, but then couldn’t locate their credit cards once they finally reached the counter.
The people who stood gabbing in front of an elevator, trapping four shoppers inside, at the packed Pottery Barn.
The people who stopped to talk on their cell phones in the center of a busy sidewalk, the people who tied their shoes right in front of the revolving doors at the downtown Talbots, and the people who held up the line at Borders because they were so busy reading a magazine that they couldn’t hear the frazzled cashier shouting, “Next please. Next please. Next please.”
“It’s unreal,” James said, clearly ready to call it a day at 12:39 p.m.
In a frenzied holiday season where Americans are expected to spend some $180 billion on gifts, store clerks know all about the demise of good old-fashioned shopping manners. When the crowds start to get annoyed and impatient this season, it is the store employees who usually take the brunt of the abuse.
At the Wal-Mart in Vernon Hills, a customer frantically searching for an Amazing Amy doll had ripped the shirt of one shocked store manager by 7 a.m. on Friday.
“She grabbed the back of my T-shirt and tugged,” said Joe Guidry, 25, showing off a hole the size of an orange near the bottom of his shirt. “I don’t know how it ripped, but it did.”
At the Crate & Barrel on Michigan Avenue, one woman wanted to buy just one plate out of a set of eight.
“When we told her that we couldn’t do that because they are priced as a set and we wouldn’t know what to charge for just one, she was like, `Can’t you just make something up?’ ” floor manager Andre Williams said, laughing in spite of his frustration.
In Schaumburg, the shopping mecca of the northwest suburbs, about 100 early-bird shoppers crowded around the doors at Kohl’s a little before 6 a.m., loudly knocking on the glass in hopes that the first-shift cashiers would open the store a few minutes early.
And at a toy store in Orland Park, a veteran gift wrapper–who refused to give her name out of fear for her safety–talked about one furious customer who complained loud enough for the whole store to hear that the employee’s papering prowess left something to be desired.
“I said, `Well, I can either rewrap it or give you the paper.’ And I don’t think they liked that answer,” the gift wrapper recounted.
Emily Post probably wouldn’t have been very impressed with the attitude coming from either side of the counter.
As bad as it was on Friday–as congested, tense and infuriating–the day after Thanksgiving is no longer the biggest shopping day of the year, as is commonly believed.
According to experts at Sears, Roebuck and Co., a traditional destination for millions of holiday shoppers, the busiest day is the Saturday before Christmas, when tens of millions of procrastinators hit the stores for a last-minute spree.
Still, buoyed by a booming economy, the lowest unemployment rate in 30 years and rising wages, Americans–with or without shopping etiquette in tow–were overrunning Chicago area malls even as their Thanksgiving leftovers chilled in the refrigerator.
A consumer survey by Deloitte & Touche and the National Retail Federation predicted that holiday spending would surge by about 6.5 percent this year–the biggest increase in half a decade. The survey also reported that Americans are expected to spend an average of $849 on gifts in November and December, a 4.3 percent increase from 1998.
So despite the annoyances–and there were plenty of them on Friday–there were at least a few glimmers of holiday-shopping goodwill.
At the still-under-construction Nordstrom on Michigan Avenue, a trio of construction workers sang Christmas carols from a third-floor window.
Outside the Hancock Center, a pair of harried shoppers took time to direct a lost mother and her daughter to the American Girl Place a few blocks away.
And at the Vernon Hills Wal-Mart, when employee Miguel Mendoza saw a mob of customers making a mad dash for the last two boxes of a popular toy, the 16-year-old was pleasantly surprised to escape a shopping-cart melee.
The people who were beaten to the toy simply shrugged and moved on. And then, amazingly, the two shoppers who had been lucky enough to snag the remaining toys hurried after the unsuccessful shoppers and offered friendly advice on where the item might still be found.
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