Last year, Clark County’s Black Friday shoppers had to endure a dreary and rainy morning, but this year brought cold temperatures and clear skies, inspiring crowds of shoppers to bundle up and venture out early.
Clark County’s Fred Meyer stores opened their doors at 5 a.m. Friday, drawing long lines of customers eager to take home electronics, kitchen appliances and above all else, socks.
The chain’s Black Friday sock sale has achieved near-legendary status. The scene at the Orchards Fred Meyer on Friday morning exemplified the tradition: A series of tables ran down the center aisle at the store’s main entrance, next to the clothing department, piled high with boxes of socks.
Dozens of shoppers crowded the display, picking pairs from a selection of just about every sock design imaginable — athletic socks, business socks, thick wool socks and an enormous assortment of holiday-themed socks. Employees regularly hauled out fresh boxes of socks to add to the pile.
In the rest of the store there was a sharp contrast between the nearly empty grocery section and the packed clothing, kitchen and home sections. Hundreds of shoppers pushed carts filled with Instant Pots, clothing and holiday gifts. And socks — nearly always socks.
“Every year I come for socks, and then I find other stuff I have to have,” said shopper Debbie Gwinn. “But mostly it’s socks.”
Gwinn and her husband, Kevin, said they’ve been going to Fred Meyer for the sock sale for 10 years, and have visited every Fred Meyer in Clark County.
Fred Meyer expects to sell more than a million pairs of socks across all of its locations, according to spokesman Jeffery Temple.
Walmart
At the Walmart Supercenter on 192nd Avenue, store manager Brandi Quinlan said she expected Black Friday customers to turn their attention to toys and TVs.
“Toys and electronics seem to be the biggest, most popular departments,” she said. “TV’s are always one of the hottest items for us.”
Apple’s Airpods were a notable item at both Walmart and Fred Meyer; the wireless earphones are rarely on sale, according to staff at both stores.
At Walmart, the expected Black Friday crunch highlighted several ways in which technology has begun to assist both shoppers and staff. The Walmart Supercenter locations never close, so “Black Friday” begins at 6 p.m. on Thanksgiving when the various discounts and deals become available.
Quinlan said her staff planned to split customers up into more manageable lines at individual departments. The Walmart app includes a color-coded in-store map to help customers find their way to the right line.
“We’re trying to avoid those big masses of people in any one area,” she said.
Online ordering with in-store pickup is becoming increasingly popular, she said, and this year’s Black Friday was the store’s first with a new “Pickup Tower” near the front of the store, letting customers quickly collect purchases and cut down on wait times.
The tower is essentially a giant, floor-to-ceiling cylindrical locker, with a mechanism at the center to grab items from individual slots and deposit them at the bottom for customers. On Black Friday, there’s also a staging area for products such as bikes and TVs that are too big for the locker.
Behind the scenes, the store is also one of the first to be upgraded with a “FAST Unloader” machine to sort through shipments as they’re pulled off of trucks. And although they likely won’t be seen roaming around on Black Friday, the store is also equipped with self-driving floor-scrubbing machines.
At the mall
At Vancouver Mall, the first round of Black Friday shopping kicked off at 6 p.m. Thursday evening. It was slow at first, according to mall marketing manager Bree Sanchez, but traffic picked up as more families finished their Thanksgiving dinner and headed out.
“Last night we started getting pretty busy around 8 o’clock,” she said.
The J.C. Penney store remained open through the night, and the rest of the mall reopened at 6 a.m. Friday, drawing another wave of shoppers that continued to build throughout the morning. Individual stores including Bath & Body Works were visibly packed with holiday shoppers by around 8 a.m.
The shoppers at the mall tend to come from all demographics, although Sanchez said a greater proportion of the visitors appear to be couples or families.
“Families are able to go to one place and then divide and conquer,” she said.
Consumers tend to think of Thanksgiving as the signal to start their holiday shopping, she said, but this year’s late Thanksgiving means the unofficial shopping season is six days shorter than in 2018 — and it appears to be changing the behavior of both shoppers and businesses.
“It’ll be interesting this year because we have such a shorter season,” Sanchez said.
The mall saw higher-than-usual traffic on Wednesday, according to Sanchez, and she said several stores have pushed out Black Friday deals that start sooner and continue longer, which she expected would fuel additional shopping through the weekend.
