SAUGUS — Shoppers were in good spirits the day after Thanksgiving as they hunted for this year’s best Black Friday sales at the Square One Mall.
Besides serving as an opportunity to get a headstart on holiday shopping, the groups of friends and families that made up Friday’s particularly large hoard of shoppers proved that going to the mall on Black Friday is as much of a tradition and social experience as it is a chance to score some good deals.
Square One manager Mike Connell, who had been at the shopping center since 4:30 a.m. to oversee the day’s chaos, couldn’t say for certain, but said he felt he’d seen an uptick in mall traffic compared to last year.
“It definitely has a different feel to it. Last year was good, but this year definitely has a different feel to it,” he said. “There’s more of a momentum to it than last year.”
As it has done for the last several years, Square One opened its doors for an extended period of time — from midnight to 10 p.m. — to maximize the amount of time shoppers can capitalize on some of the biggest savings of the year.
“I’ve been here 22 years and I’ve never seen anything like it,” Northshore Mall’s General Manager Mark Whiting said of the Peabody shopping center’s notably bigger crowd.
Whiting said getting an exact count was difficult because the Northshore Mall doesn’t use traffic counters, but that most retailers he spoke with were well on track to meet their business plans, and many had even surpassed last year’s sales.
In addition to good weather, a good economy, and fewer than usual shopping days before Christmas, Whiting credited the more sentimental side of Black Friday shopping for this year’s rising numbers.
“There’s a lot of tradition involved today, a lot of families visiting from out of town, and it’s an experience for them to go to the mall,” he said.
“People still need to socialize, and Christmas is still a highly sentimental gift-giving experience. A lot of people don’t want to make a mistake regarding the quality of their purchase, so the best way to do that is to come out and buy it [in person] and make sure it meets their standards.”
Whiting recalled one run-in he had this year with a group of women who had been Black Friday shopping together since 1994.
“They had matching t-shirts,” Whiting said. “It was really something.”
Many of the shoppers wandering around Square One had already hit several other malls earlier in the day, starting their rounds before sunrise in hopes of beating the worst of the rush.
Randy Miller of Marblehead said he had been mall-hopping with his son since 5 a.m., first stopping the Northshore and Liberty Tree Malls before making their way to Saugus. The two were on an expedition to find a reasonably-priced virtual reality headset. Miller said the pair’s early-morning sale hunt meant they beat the heaviest crowds. “It was a lot lighter than I expected,” he said.
Rebecca DeAndrade of Tewksbury said she had finished her shopping early and was casually browsing the sales with two of her friends, one of whom said Square One was the third mall the group had been to so far.
“When we came earlier it wasn’t that bad,” DeAndrade said of the growing crowd. “It’s a lot busier than it was before.”
