The traffic signals are ready, reprogrammed to give more time for tens of thousands of turns off Route 7 and onto Retail Boulevard. Five Guys has ordered 3,000 pounds of potatoes for french fries, double the usual. And fleets of salespeople at Hecht's are prepared to straighten and refold stacks of cashmere sweaters on the hour.
Tysons Corner Center, a veritable city of 2.3 million square feet with 53,000 shoppers on a normal day last year, was ready for a busy day yesterday. This was Black Friday, when the crowds grow by the thousands, to 70,000 last year at Tysons, where the first stores open at 5 a.m. and the last close at 11 p.m. This is the day when retailers begin the holiday shopping season in earnest, the time when they'll rake in nearly 20 percent of their annual sales. This is the day the red ink traditionally begins to turn black.
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Early Holiday Shoppers Hunt for Bargains
Bargain shoppers, many facing frigid temperatures, woke up before dawn Friday to snap up specials on items from cashmere sweaters to flat-screen TVs and digital music players as the holiday shopping season officially got under way.
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Yesterday's crowds and the bargains they pursued gave assurance that tradition would hold.
At 4:33 a.m. yesterday, the mass of concrete, steel and glass was brightly lit even though the sun had yet to come up. "Frosty the Snowman" blared over the loudspeakers, and Disney Store manager Eileen Brown was operating on about four hours of sleep.
The store would open in about half an hour, the first of the mall's nearly 300 retailers to let shoppers in.
Brown cracked the security gate about 15 minutes before opening to admit a tardy employee. She had 25 seasonal workers to help handle the crowds. Already, a handful of early-bird shoppers was waiting outside, wallets at the ready.
"It'll just be a few more minutes," Brown told them.
To customers, Black Friday means one thing: bargains.
5 a.m.: First Stores Open
If Tysons and other malls were preparing for a marathon day, the big-box stores were ready for wind sprints.
The first customer to get through the sliding doors of the Wal-Mart on Fair Lakes Parkway in Fairfax County had been sitting outside the store in frigid temperatures since Thursday at 6:30 p.m. Others spent the night camped in tents in the parking lot.
It took Wal-Mart store manager Lee Lowe nearly half an hour to usher hundreds of people waiting outside into the store for the 5 a.m. opening, under the watchful eye of police and amid some pushing and shoving. Those last in line had little chance of getting their hands on two of the big specials of the morning: a 42-inch plasma TV for $997 and an HP Pavilion laptop for $398. They were gone within minutes.
Anna Lam of Centreville packed her cart with 12 two-quart slow cookers, on sale for $3.98. She couldn't resist the price, she said, and would give some to friends and family.
