Shoppers spent much green on Black Friday

Retailers were seeing green, and shoppers said they were surprisingly not seeing red on Black Friday - annually the biggest shopping day of the year.
“It’s crazy,” said Jamaica resident Maria Alcantara excitedly, while assessing clothes on her 5-year-old Jacob at The Children’s Place in the Queens Center Mall. Alcantara, who arrived at the mall at 8:30 a.m., estimated that she would blow through $200 by her 5 p.m. departure time. The figure, however, would be a good chunk of her holiday budget - about $500 - and a portion of the estimated $9 billion spent by holiday shoppers nationwide, which generally send retailers’ balance sheets from the red into the black.
According to the National Retail Federal, about 147 million shoppers took to the stores Thanksgiving weekend, spending an average of $347 each - down 3.5 percent from last year but up 14.8 percent from 2005.
“It’s like madness,” said Liat Alfi, who visited the Queens Center Mall with her family, while on holiday from Israel. When asked if she would ever come again, Alfi hesitated, “I don’t know,” she said before breaking into a smile. “Yes, I think so. It’s worth it.”
Dad Chris Alexander from Woodside said he was stuck with a double-whammy this holiday - his five-year-old son Christian has a birthday right before Christmas. Alexander said he purchased the Nintendo DS plus a game for his son, setting him back about $200 so far, but he expected to shell out a lot more for presents for Christian and his wife.
And Richmond Hill residents, husband and wife Kashmir Chand and Surndir Kaur, said they took advantage of the sale to shop for themselves.
“We found everything to be good, all of the sales,” Kaur said, while waiting on line in JCPenney to pay for a black pea coat.
“We’ll buy presents maybe next month,” her husband joked.
By 11 a.m. on Black Friday, Crystal Batista, manager of Afaze, a shop of accessories and jewelry at the Queens Center Mall, said the store had pulled in $3,900, on track for recording an expected $10,000 by day’s end.
“It’s been going great,” she said, taking her first mini-break since opening at the store at 5 a.m. that morning, “It’s been very busy.”
Popular items included rain boots and jewelry.
“We get a lot of people who want to see what’s going to match their holiday outfit, and then there are a lot of people who buy gifts.”
Although the mid-morning rush had begun to die down, Batista predicted that the shop would be swarmed again at lunchtime.
“I don’t think anything is going to stop them [shoppers],” she laughed. “They see things in the window they like and come in.”
Meanwhile at JCPenney, manager Joie Johnston said between 800 and 900 eager customers were waiting at the gates when the store opened at 5 a.m.
“So far we’re ahead of last year and ahead of our expectations,” she said.
To prep for the post-Thanksgiving shop-a-thon, which lasted until 11 p.m., Johnston said she went to sleep at about 9 p.m. the night before. “It’s just natural energy,” she said.
“We hired a few people and made sure that we got all of our merchandise presented in a fashionable way,” Johnston said of her first Black Friday with the Queens branch of the national retail chain.
Cara Ossias, a manager at The Body Shop, said she had been through day before, so the store’s employees filled up on coffee, soda and sweets to keep them going.
By about 10:30 a.m., the store had already recorded about $2,000 in sales, Ossias said, explaining that she and the other manager, Carmen Gonzalez, were nearly finished with their shifts.
Their plans for the rest of the day? “Shop, sell,” Gonzalez joked, “Try to get out of the parking lot.”
Downstairs at Bamba Toys, manager Paul Brownfeld watched gleefully as wide-eyed tots clutched potential presents.
“The economy may be hard, but people always have money to buy toys,” he said, explaining that kids will plead, “Mommy, I’ll do good in school, buy me a Matchbox car.”
“The last two weeks before Christmas, in my experience, are the busiest,” he said.
Moreover, this year, many of the toys are electronic or have computerized features like the popular Bratz dolls.
Brownfeld said that he plans to indulge in a little retail therapy to celebrate the holidays and his own birthday on Christmas Eve.
“I’m going to buy myself a toy … a remote control car,” he said. “It’s very good therapy to play with a car.”