Tonya Ortega was on a mission for a giant plush Olaf doll for her 19-month-old daughter, Zuri, a big “Frozen” fan.
It was on sale at Toys R Us for $19.99, which at 30 percent off, was a deal she wasn’t about to miss.
So Ortega, her mother, Donna Fox, and mother-in-law, Rocio Ortega, lined up Thursday afternoon outside of Toys R Us at 3300 N. Western Ave., the first Thanksgiving Day shopping trek for the Albany Park family.
Did they forgo a traditional holiday feast?
“We had all that done by 2,” Fox said.
For all the hand-wringing about retailers hurting family bonds by opening their doors earlier and earlier on Thanksgiving Day, many shoppers in search of deals applaud the move.
“I love it,” said Naiya Moton, 21, a Black Friday regular who lives in Austin. “At night it’s freezing. In the daytime you get it out of the way and get it done.”
Moton, who works at a day care center, arrived less than four hours before Target’s 6 p.m. opening Thursday and found herself second in line at the store at Division and Larrabee streets, ensuring she’d walk out with one of the 40-inch Element LED/LCD TVs on sale at the door-buster price of $119. Thanksgiving dinner was already prepared, she said, and she’d be home in time to eat it.
Retailers were offering steep discounts to kick off the Black Friday shopping weekend, when some 140 million shoppers are expected to break open their wallets in stores and online, about the same anticipated turnout as last year.
About 25.6 million people expected to shop on Thanksgiving Day, according to a National Retail Federation survey, fewer than last year, though the trade group noted that many people decide to hit the stores spontaneously after dinner. Last year, 44.8 million people ended up shopping on Thanksgiving, far more than had said they planned to.
The federation, the retail industry’s largest trade group, has predicted that retail spending over the holiday months will increase 4.1 percent over last year, to $616.9 billion, as improved consumer confidence, lower unemployment and low gas prices get people back in the buying spirit.
Last year, the group predicted sales would increase 3.9 percent, but actual growth was more modest, at 3.1 percent.
As she sat shivering under a blanket in a folding chair at the head of the line at Best Buy in Lincoln Park, LaTanya Moore said she expected to spend more during the holidays this year than last.
Moore, 43, who works as a Head Start ambassador and lives on the South Side, had arrived at 8:20 a.m., many hours before the store’s 5 p.m. opening, to snag a $199 50-inch Panasonic TV and several of the $399 iPad Air 2s to give as Christmas gifts to family members.
Moore said she had been saving up since January to make this a more generous Christmas than last year, when only her 5-year-old grandchild got presents.
She also said she liked the earlier hours because it freed up time in the evening to spend time with family. Anyway, Moore added, her tradition is to host Christmas dinner rather than Thanksgiving, and her two teenage daughters are Target employees and were working anyway.
Desmond White, 22, and his 15-year-old brother were lined up at Best Buy at their mother’s behest, also angling for one of those $199 TVs. His family does Thanksgiving dinner at 7 or 8 p.m., so he would be back at home in Englewood in time, though if it were up to him he would be doing all the holiday shopping online rather than standing in line in the cold.
Data suggest many people have the same idea.
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Online sales were up 12 percent Thursday evening compared with last year, and smartphones played an increasingly large role in shopping, according to IBM Digital Analytics Benchmark. Mobile traffic accounted for almost half of all online traffic and mobile sales accounted for 30 percent of all online sales, both numbers up about 26 percent from last year, IBM said.
While the average online order value was flat, people were buying more items per order, suggesting they are becoming more savvy at using online coupons and rebates to get the best bargains, it said.
White, a student at Lane College in Tennessee who was back in town for the holiday, had things besides shopping on his mind. He was wondering whether he should participate in the swelling calls to boycott Black Friday shopping as a way to protest a Missouri grand jury’s decision on Monday not to indict police officer Darren Wilson for the fatal shooting of unarmed teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo.
The boycott campaign, which encourages people to protest with their wallets, has been catching fire on social media, with the hashtags #NotOneDime, #BlackoutFriday and #BlackoutBlackFriday.
“My peers were saying we should boycott it,” White said. “But I don’t know what (good) it’s going to do.”
But on Thursday, at least, there didn’t seem to be any dampening of the shopping spirit that Charlie O’Shea could see. O’Shea, a vice president at Moody’s Investment Service, does a loop of stores in Northern New Jersey every year, and he said he’s noticed lines getting longer as stores open earlier, with most people vying for tablets and TVs. He expects the race to start earlier and earlier to continue.
“If you want to be in this game, you’ve got to open when your competitors are open or you’re not giving (consumers) a choice,” O’Shea said.
While the current Thanksgiving Day trend seems to be a matter of retailers keeping up with their competitors, one retail expert wonders whether retailers will think it worthwhile ultimately, given the higher salaries they have to pay to employees who work on Thanksgiving Day and the steep discounts they offer.
“I’m thinking that eventually the profit numbers are going to have to decide,” said Bill Martin, founder of ShopperTrak, a Chicago-based company that analyzes in-store shopping patterns.
Although major big-box stores have gotten on the Thanksgiving Day bandwagon, plenty of retailers remain closed.
That was a disappointment for the Olson family, which was visiting Chicago from Traverse City, Mich. Sue and Duce Olson and their two kids, 9-year-old Aidan and 7-year-old Sophie, had planned their day around visiting Water Tower Place in the evening, which for the first time opened at 6 p.m. Thursday.
But while the line stretched long to get into Macy’s, most of the other stores in the mall were closed, including American Girl Place and The Lego Store, a major frustration for Sophie.
How did they plan to spend the evening instead?
“Probably listen to more whining and take a taxi back to the hotel,” Sue Olson said.
Freelance writer Cheryl V. Jackson contributed.