Long lines and competitive shoppers in stores every year on the day after Thanksgiving may be a thing of the past.
With the rise of Amazon—its online shopping and same-day delivery, traditional stores empty and looking like ghost towns when they should be looking like downtown New York City.
Walmart prepared to receive hundreds of people, with extra security stationed outside and loads of employees ready to handle the questions they usually receive.
Aisles were cordoned off with balloons for the day, but they sat empty except for the few people in line who didn’t even cover an eighth of the space set aside for the line.
“I came here expecting to have to fight for my Nintendo Switch, but looks like I’m the only one in line,” said Alberto Gomez, father of three and a Walmart shopper.
Though traditionally people have preferred the immediacy of buying physically in-store versus having to wait for the package to arrive within days of the order going through, the rise of same day shipping—and even in some cases, same day arrival—has made people not mind the wait.
“We are up from other years,” said Tina Marianas, the assistant manager for the West Covina Walmart. “Everything in Electronics is being bought up.”
Other shoppers, who were not interested in Black Friday shopping but went grocery shopping for the Thanksgiving dinner said that they had purposely set aside many hours to deal with the large amounts of people and long lines that they expected.
Other stores report record lows in attendance for their Black Friday events.
Traffic to physical stores dipped between 1 and 6.6 percent as compared to their online counterparts as reported by ShopperTrak, a customer attendance tracking service.
Black Friday Best Buy shopper and Citrus College student, Sean Lewallyn said the low attendance surprised him.
“It was emptier than I expected… I breezed through the lines and process,” Lewallyn said.
He said he went to Best Buy to buy a new iPhone XR and like the Walmart shopper set aside a lot of time for the lines and slow process he expected to find.
Many stores estimated that this year has had low purchases made in more traditional, physical stores versus their online counterparts.
But as for who is winning at the holiday shopping scramble, CNN Business reported Big-Box-Stores like Target, Walmart, Best Buy and Kohl’s had a very strong Black Friday shopping weekend that continued all the way to Cyber Monday.
These sales also includes both online and the brick-and-mortar stores.
As for the stores that have not had a good holiday shopping season, Forbes Magazine says that many times if the season goes weak for stores many times they don’t survive to the next holiday season.
“That seems to be the case, (small businesses) are going out of business due to the big box stores opening up in Azusa,” said Steven Castro, Azusa Chamber of Commerce C.E.O.
But as for overall information on the state of holiday commerce and shopping in the City of Azusa, Castro said that most of that information doesn’t get analyzed until January of 2019
