Yahoo – AFP,
29 Nov 2014
 |
Black
Friday shoppers leave the Target store in Fairfax, Virginia, on
November 28,
2014 (AFP Photo/Paul J. Richards)
|
Washington
(AFP) - The top US shopping "holiday" saw a surge this year in online
sales with smaller crowds in stores -- but Black Friday still brought some of
its trademark shopping mall pandemonium.
Businesses
usually offer deep discounts starting early Friday morning, prompting massive
crowds that have led to numerous injuries and a number of deaths in years past.
This year,
businesses continued a trend in starting shopping deals earlier and extending
them longer, leading to smaller crowds.
 |
Protesters
march outside Macy's store
during the Black Friday protest on
November 28, 2014
in New York
(AFP Photo/Kena Betancur)
|
But many
major retailers, including discount megastore Walmart, also emphasized online
shopping as a way to get consumers purchasing faster.
There were
smaller lines and fewer packs of frenzied shoppers at malls around the country
Thursday night and Friday, US media reported.
Still,
several people were injured and three were arrested after a shopping fight
early Friday morning at a department store in southern California, reports
said.
And what
appeared to be a murder suicide took place Friday night at a Nordstrom
department store in Chicago. Police deemed it "domestic-related,"
according to the Chicago Tribune.
This year
the shopping day was also caught up in a furor over the decision not to indict
the police officer who killed an unarmed black teenager in Missouri. The
shooting has put American race-relations under scrutiny and prompted
demonstrations over how police, especially white officers, interact with
African Americans.
Black
public figures called for Black Friday boycotts, and in Ferguson, Missouri,
where the killing took place, protests briefly shut down a local mall.
In the west
coast city of Seattle, protesters chained a mall's doors closed, and in
California's San Francisco, hundreds rallied and a police officer was injured
by a bottle thrown at a police car, local media reported Friday.
Meanwhile,
the FBI recorded 144,000 background checks for Black Friday gun sales, CNN
reported. Black Friday is one of the busiest days for gun sales in the US, the
FBI said.
Online
sales on the rise
Early
reports showed up to a 22 percent increase in Black Friday online shopping
compared to last year, as well as an increasing number of people shopping
online on Thanksgiving.
Thanksgiving
online sales were up by 20 percent, according to a report from commercial
analyst ChannelAdvisor Corp.
For the
first time the majority of online sales came from mobile devices, a report by
IBM said.
The largest
day of online sales typically comes on the Monday following Black Friday, when
stores offer a number of online-only discounts.
Retailers
have been buoyed by predictions that a drop in gas prices and higher consumer
confidence could lead to higher sales overall this year.
The start
of the US holiday shopping season has slowly been been broken up into a number
of shopping days including "Gray Thursday," "Black Friday,"
Small Business Saturday," and "Cyber Monday" to prompt sales
ahead of Christmas.
US
president Barack Obama made a surprise visit Saturday morning to a landmark
Washington bookstore to support small businesses.
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