Mall report: Did you see evidence of the slumping economy?
All of the economic news has been bleak. Retailers have been forecasting lousy returns for the holiday shopping season and they’ve been touting their bargains to encourage shoppers.
According to our story in Wednesday’s newspaper and on STLtoday…
Most surveys predict no more than a small increase in foot traffic this weekend compared to past years, and the National Retail Federation expects the ranks of shoppers to shrink a bit. Then there’s the question of how much they will spend, both this weekend and through Christmas. Personal spending has fallen in recent months, and while consumers indicated a slight increase in confidence in a survey released Tuesday, few economists expect that to last.
So, today is Black Friday, the big shopping day. Have you been in the trenches? Did you brave the shopping aisles and cash registers? How’d it look out there? Did you see any evidence of the gloom and doom that retailers have been predicting?
Kurt is the director of social media for the Post-Dispatch, where he has worked since August 2002. He's been a journalist since 1982, covering municipal government, courts, education and two hurricanes as a reporter before becoming an editor. 
A very interesting thing I observed. Most people were buying one or two items rather than a cart full this year. The stores were busy but very little was being bought.
I drove by a Target just as it was opening and saw people charging in like they were handing out $100 bills. People camping out overnight, waking up at 1 a.m…. no thanks. My time’s worth something, too. I’ll shop online, and at non-peak times and save the jostling and shoving and elbow-throwing for another time.
I was at the South County Best Buy this morning at 4:45. It wasn’t as crowded as last year. Probably a hundred fewer people in line. Most of them crowded into lines waiting to buy laptops and desktops. I got my games and got the heck out!
Clearly the way out of this depression is for each individual to take on more debt and to accept some of that debt from the financial industry’s bad and corrupt business practices and to take on this debt for them without any personal gain. This is the patriotic thing to do. Because if Nationalism is applied in this way, lemmings, I mean people can then be lead off the cliff carrying this debt and the debt is shifted to individuals and not the corporation. We must save the corporation because the corporation loves us and wants us to be happy. God Bless the Corporation!
I agree with Clearly. We must take on more debt! The way out of any budget and trade deficit is to take on ever increasing amounts of debt. We can’t let the corporate CEO’s down. They’re counting on us to deliver them all a 12th and 13th vacation home and a HUGE year end bonus, we can’t let them down!
I know some people that won’t purchase anything Made in China this year. So what I do to combat that is scream at them “YOU’RE AS RACIST AS HELL!”. This is really effective in American society because people are afraid of labels like “racist” because it is used to destroy them and rob them of their cultural identity. This way I destroy this persons ability to make informed decisions and turn them in to just another consumeristic, anti-American, robot just like me!
People who shop today are morons
A lot of places are offering at least some of their black Friday sales on-line, like Home Depot and Macys. I’m doing some shopping in a few minutes, and I’m still wearing my pajamas.
I have heard and read that retailers will be dropping their prices to “black Friday” levels all the way up to Christmas because of the economy. So why bother with the throngs of inconsiderate shoppers early in the morning? Besides, all the flyers I looked at had no real good offereings this year, just “stuff”, nothing I saw made me want to deal with the early morning madness. I will be vigilant from now up until Xmas to spot the deals that will be out there anyway.
I saved a ton of money on Black Friday by sleeping in. A bargain is no bargain if you buy something you don’t need just because it’s on sale.