LIHU‘E — Kaua‘i was not excluded from the Black Friday mania, which blanketed the country.
An elderly gentleman watched stoically as shoppers and motorists jammed the Walmart Lihu‘e parking lot and store Thursday evening, the scene of headlights snaking through the parking lot punctuated by lightning bursts over the Kalepa mountain range.
“I live at Sun Village and every year, I see this madness,” an elderly lady said, quickly moving through the crowd with the aid of a cane. “This year, since it started early, I thought I would experience this on my way home. I’ve never seen anything like this.”
As she spoke, a motorist, aggravated with the traffic in the filled parking lot, swerved his car and angrily shoe-horned it between two cars parked in the handicapped parking area, quickly abandoning his steel steed and disappearing into the surge of customers heading into the store.
“We need to get in there for the TVs,” a young girl said, pulling her father who tried to get a last puff from his cigarette, the father saying he had never experienced a Black Friday. “You can’t just buy it. You need to stand in line for a ticket, pay for it, and then, at 10 p.m., get your TV.”
Despite several arrests made at a Paramont, California Walmart of people blocking streets in protest to demand better wages and benefits for employees, according to an Associated Press story, there were no blocking of streets in Lihu‘e.
A disagreement over a parking space Friday, led to two people being shot and wounded outside a Tallahassee, Florida Walmart, states another AP story. The man and woman, discovered at the store’s outdoor garden center, were taken to a hospital with non-life threatening injuries.
The biggest problem at the Lihu‘e store was broken shopping carts as parking lot monitors answered the call for more carts.
The scene was repeated at the Kukui Grove Center which celebrated a midnight opening as people crowded the entrances to the Macy’s stores as well as the tents set outside the Deja Vu Surf Hawai‘i and other tenant stores who elected to open at midnight.
“This is the only store we’ll have a midnight opening,” said Sara Miura, the Deja Vu marketing director. “Kapa‘a will open at 8 a.m. and we’ll have specials at The Shops at Kukui‘ula, but that store will open at 10 a.m.”
An International Council of Shopping Centers-Goldman Sachs survey of 1,000 consumers states that 33 percent intended to shop on Black Friday, down one percentage point from last year, states an AP story.
But it is estimated that sales on Black Friday will be up 3.8 percent to $11.4 billion, according to technology company, Shopper Trak, which did not forecast sales from Thanksgiving Day.
On Kaua‘i, Walmart Lihu‘e and the Big Kmart store were both open through Thanksgiving Day, many shoppers leaving Kmart having Christmas trees strapped to their cars and one shopper waiting for the Macy’s opening noting that Walmart didn’t have to close their doors on shoppers after reaching capacity on the number of people allowed in the building.
McDonald’s Restaurants at Kukui Grove touted an 8 p.m. opening, attracting a crowd of shoppers anticipating the midnight opening and the line of shoppers extended outside the Starbuck’s store and down the sidewalk past the former video rental store.
“Nana wants coffee so she went to get some at Starbuck’s,” a shopper outside Macy’s said. “She’ll be sleeping all day, Friday since she has to get up early Saturday to catch a plane.”
Kellie Hines of the Puakea Golf Course spent her Thanksgiving Day serving food at the Kapa‘a Interfaith Association, but could not resist the temptation to check out Black Friday, comfortably seated on a planter box.
“I was able to manage a nap in between,” she said while watching the crowd surge through the doors at midnight. “But this is the first time I get to experience Black Friday and I wasn’t going to miss it.”
• Dennis Fujimoto, photographer and staff writer, can be reached at 245-3681 (ext. 253) or dfujimoto@thegardenisland.com.
