A crowd of just under 100 people walked through the doors of the Signal Hill Best Buy at 5 a.m. Friday morning to partake in Black Friday deals.
Black Friday is an American pseudo-holiday that marks the beginning of the Christmas shopping season on the day after Thanksgiving. The name comes from the idea that the Christmas season is when many retail stores’ books go from being in the red to the black. They entice customers with “door-buster” deals that can often be 50% or more off of the regular retail prices.
“I feel pretty good about it [this year],” said Best Buy General Manager Alisha Pearson. “I think it’ll be pretty similar to last year. The flow of online business, obviously, is really huge—a lot of people doing store pickup or curbside.”
Pearson is a 16-year veteran of Best Buy’s Black Friday sales and has seen the shift in customer habits, especially after last year as more and more consumers switch to online shopping.
Some of the big-ticket items this year are related to gaming. Due to the ongoing computer chip shortage, there have been limited supplies of gaming computer processors and video game consoles like the Xbox Series X and Playstation 5 that were released last year.
One of the first people in line was Hunter George who arrived at the Best Buy location at 11 p.m. to hopefully score a new gaming setup.
“We are trying to pick up some GPUs [Graphical Processing Units] for some computers we have been trying to build,” George said. “They have been out of stock forever. If not that, I might just get an Xbox or something.”
George was the only person in line for most of the night although more people began to arrive around 3:30 a.m. By the time doors opened between 80 and 100 people from the line entered the store looking to get deals on electronics.
“I’m not so big on waiting in line,” said Cindy Dominguez, who had never attended Black Friday before. “In the beginning, I would always be like, ‘We can’t go now, it’s too crazy,’ so I was surprised to see it like this.”
She and her friend Ernesto Fuentes got in line about 15 minutes before the store opened looking to snag a discounted Samsung TV.
“This is honestly my first time doing this. I always try to avoid it,” Dominguez said, who has family visiting from Mexico “Somebody was like [Ernesto is] out here, and I’m like, ‘Oh yeah let’s give you this experience!’”