Friday, November 24, 2006

Black Friday shopping

Well, I just came back home after the morning shopping experience. From my vantage point, it was a lot lighter than I expected. There was no more traffic at Memorial & Penn than a normal weekend and the mall and Wal-Mart/Sam's Club did not look much busier than a normal weekend, either. I would say that the traffic was a little elevated, but there were certainly no traffic jams.

Besides Quail Springs Mall and the Wal-Mart Supercenter/Sam's Club, other shops in the area include Ultimate Electronics, Super-Target, Circuit City, Barnes & Noble, Toys R Us, Office Depot, Old Navy and a few others. None of them seemed packed. But maybe that is just me. My experience is just anecdotal, but it didn't seemed to me that sales were all that brisk. What makes me think that sales were down is that the Quail Springs Mall area is also the middle-to-upper class part of Oklahoma City, so if sales aren't up in that part of town, it probably isn't up anywhere else.

I am curious what everyone else's experience is like. There is a lot of talk that there will be more online shopping this year, and I will probably be doing some of that myself. I'll be watching the numbers on Monday to see if my experience bears out everywhere else.

***Update***

Well, I just came from the south side of town. Best Buy and Crossroads mall were about 50% busier than normal. So maybe I was just in the wrong part of town. It still isn't quite as I remember from Christmas' past, but not too bad.

2 comments:

Teri said...

I'm not shopping, but found this link you might enjoy. It's a poverty simulation exercise:
http://www.betterbudgeting.com/articles/creditwise/livinginpoverty.htm

OkieLawyer said...

Wow! Thanks for the link! That is great -- and it is from Oklahoma, which is even better.

Now if only our reps in Washington would take this to heart.