I’m usually not the one that would lose sleep just to go out to find some really good deals. I hadn’t planned on going Black Friday shopping this year but I guess my friends did a really good job at persuading me.
Here in New York City, there are so many options for where you want to go shopping. There are the local malls closer to home, the big shopping areas in Manhattan, and then there are the malls and outlets out in Long Island. I’ve been told that the crowd in Long Island malls and outlets aren’t worth it and there aren’t as many things to choose from in local malls, so I decided to go to SoHo. I woke up around 2AM so I could take the train and get to the city by 4AM. When I got on the train, I was surprised to see that the train was pretty empty, which I would expect on any other day other than Black Friday.
When I got out of the Prince Street Station, I only saw two long lines waiting for the stores to open – Zara and Uniqlo. I decided not to wait outside in the cold for these stores so I went to a few other stores on Broadway. Surprisingly, there weren’t too many people in any of these stores. The wait for a fitting room was only about five minutes at most each time and there was no line at the registers when I was ready to go.
After I’ve gone to all the stores I wanted to go to, I stopped by Zara and Uniqlo to see what everyone was waiting on line for. After going in and out of both stores, I was a bit confused because after all the discounts, the price of an item was still at least 75% of its retail price which isn’t that great of a sale, if you’d ask me.
I’ve heard many stories about Black Friday – the great sales, the hour long lines, and the fights girls have over the last size. I guess I was pretty disappointed to see none of this during my Black Friday experience. The sales weren’t that great, my waiting time on all the lines I’ve been on did not even add up to an hour altogether, and there seemed to have been plenty of sizes because I didn’t see any fight going on. Maybe people have come to realize that Black Friday isn’t as great as it seems and have decided to wait for the sales in December to do their shopping.
I know what you mean here. My first Black Friday, I didn’t even go to sleep. I met my friends at the mall and we ran into stores as if there were no tomorrow. When we actually started picking things out, we found that the sales weren’t worth it, somethings weren’t even on sale. I came home with a sweater and that’s when I turned to online shopping, better deals and less work. The most entertaining people are the ones that come prepared with plans and directions as if they were creating a war strategy.