Crowds of customers literally surrounded the Wal-Mart store in Lihu’e before daybreak Friday, jostling for position to grab up a $25 bicycle or an $85 TV.
Shortly after the doors to the store opened at 6 a.m., the store was so full it was difficult to maneuver. It remained that way much of yesterday, as the ceremonial first day of Christmas shopping was launched with a slew of sales designed to propel merchants into the critical holiday gift-buying season that is taking on more of a critical stature this year in light of economic uneasiness and international incidents.
It would have been hard to sense that uneasiness in the Wal-Mart parking lot or inside the store, where the conventional wisdom was to get hands on marked-down items, then move as directly as possible to the layaway department to tuck them away until the needed cash is accumulated to retrieve them.
Outside, shoppers rushed to find parking anywhere and everywhere, including grass median strips and any place else a vehicle would fit.
While that scene was repeated at various stores on the other islands (Ala Moana Center in Honolulu was packed, in part because Macy’s new flagship store in the islands is located there and opened yesterday with flashy festivities), it was something of a misnomer to declare the Friday after Thanksgiving as the busiest shopping day of the year on Kaua’i.
People here tend to do their Christmas shopping later in the season, not in the blurry morning hours after one of those rare midweek holidays.
But there were happy shoppers pushing carts full of goodies, household items and presents, who declared in the parking lots of Wal-Mart and Kmart that they had not only started their Christmas shopping, but had completed it.
The grand opening of the Macy’s (formerly Liberty House) Kukui Grove Center was much more subdued than the cymbal-crashing commencement at Ala Moana. But shoppers and employees at the Lihu’e store were scurrying about, smiles on their faces.
The season arrived with thunder at some Kaua’i stores, and not as loudly at others. Customers and merchants were coming to dread and anticipate in equal measures this holiday shopping season, especially with an economy spiraling downward from earlier this year and the uncertainties still associated with the events on and after Sept. 11.
Staff Writer Paul C. Curtis can be reached at mailto:pcurtis@pulitzer.net or 245-3681 (ext. 224).
