Published: December 01, 2008 10:21 am      

Local retail sector gears up for Black Friday

By Kelly Young

kyoung@jacksonvilleprogress.com

Black Friday is typically one of the busiest shopping days of the year across America, and with many local retail stores offering special deals and sales on top of sales, it appears that that trend will hold true for Jacksonville as well.

Many area businesses spent time this past week preparing for the onslaught they know to be coming Friday morning.

“We have back-stocked a lot of items because we expect sales to be so strong this weekend, especially on Black Friday,” said Erica Torres, assistant store manager at Bealls Department Store. “I don’t really know exactly how many shoppers we are expecting to have on Friday, but the foot traffic is always much higher than the regular shopping day.”

Roy Horton, store manager of the Jacksonville Wal-Mart, said certain categories of products are especially hot commodities for Christmas shoppers.

“Toy items, televisions, DVD players and other electronics are all key Christmas shopping items. We keep key categories like those stockpiled so we don’t sell out of anything,” Horton said. “Black Friday is actually the busiest day of the year for my store, in terms of both foot traffic and sales. We are expecting to have between 8,000 and 9,000 customers here this year, up from about 3,000 on the average day.”

The local RadioShack store also reported that Black Friday is their single busiest day of the year. Store Manager Jeff Baldwin said his staff has been “working like crazy” to prepare for Friday’s shopping surge.

To accommodate the extra shoppers, many local retailers will be offering extended hours on Friday. RadioShack, typically open from 9:30 a.m. to 8 p.m., will be in business from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m., and Bealls will open its doors early at 7 a.m. Horton said he will have every register at the local Wal-Mart open, Friday, to manage the flow of traffic and to help minimize the length of the lines.

Torres said Bealls will be offering early bird specials from 7 a.m. to 1 p.m. in all of their store’s departments. Despite trying economic times across the nation, she said sales have been good so far this year, and Torres is hopeful the holiday shopping season will be equally positive.

“We’ve had some really slow days where we haven’t been making our goals, but for the year we are actually ahead a little bit,” she said. “With the economy the way it is, we were thinking that we might have a slow morning for Black Friday, but with gas prices so low we are hoping a lot of people will be able to get out and shop this year.”

Horton said Christmas shopping figures are vitally important to whether a business meets its yearly sales goals.

“The fourth quarter of the year is the golden quarter for us; that’s when a big percentage of our sales get done. Hopefully Friday will be the beginning of a good season for us,” Horton said.