By Bill Parry
After four hours of braving the crowds of Black Friday shoppers at the Queens Center mall, Tafiqa from Woodside and her friend Sadia of Jackson Heights needed a break. The two slumped to the floor outside the Aeropostale store surrounded by a dozen shopping bags filled with jackets, clothing and kitchen appliances.
“We’ve spent about $500 so far and we’re still going to give it another hour or so,” Tafiqa said. “We’re really giving the credit cards a workout this year but we’ve found some pretty good deals.”
At Aeropostale, which is closing in January for renovations, all merchandise was 70 percent off and the aisles were jammed with customers. The Apple store was so busy shoppers waited on line to get in, though shoe store Vince Camuto was empty despite 50 percent off and Rockport was nearly empty despite 40 percent off.
Garage, a clothing and outerwear shop for young women, was jammed thanks to a clever marketing stunt and the high-energy barker skills of 23-year-old Christine Rodriguez of Far Rockaway outside the front door. Shouting, “there are no losers, only winners,” “everyone’s on a roll today” and “she’s a big winner,” Rodriguez would fill out a voucher with the size of the discount each shopper won with the spin of a wheel.
Standing nearby admiring her work was a security guard from Long Island City, Anthony Collins, who was posted at Garage for the first time.
“I usually work at banks, but my company shifted me here for the seasonal work,” he said. “She’s really doing a great job. I just asked an elderly fellow if he was shopping for his granddaughter because there’s nothing here for him, just girls’ clothes with an all female staff. I guess he was happy with the deal he won at the spinning wheel so he’s just looking for something.”
Other wheels were spinning too, on rolling luggage belonging to tourists, like husband and wife Yu and Ivy Li. The couple had a few pieces of luggage they planned to fill with merchandise for the trip home to Taiwan later in the day.
“Queens Center is halfway between the hotel and JFK so we thought we’d get some shopping done and kill some time,” he said. “It’s a good mall. Very well run.”
Even more so this season, as the mall is now using technology to enhance the shopping experience. One of those technological enhancements is Instant Messaging, which lets shoppers text one of four rotating concierges, like 27-year-old Jazmen White of Astoria.
“Guests can now text us from their cell phones and download a mall app so that we can better provide information,” she said. “It helps with store-finding and we can handle complaints better, little things like a service outage on one of our escalators, we can get a repair team there quickly so things run more smoothly. We also have shoppers text and ask about the parking situation in our garage. We just pick up the phone and ask the garage. It’s really helped to open up communications this year.”
Reach reporter Bill Parry by e-mail at bparr
