In a tradition that seems to take a bigger slice of Thanksgiving every year, hordes of deal-sniffing shoppers descended on Southland stores Thursday, elbowing their way in search of toys, video games and that time-honored Black Friday symbol: cut-rate television sets. As nightfall came, they huddled in long lines, clutching coupons and hatching shopping strategies.
Rebecca Abbott, 42, of Torrance had it down to a science Thursday night. The accountant said she was out the door of the local Toys R Us store in 20 minutes with a shopping cart full of Christmas gifts for her two daughters.
Her fourth time shopping on Black Friday, Abbott had spent a few hours in Toys R Us the day before scoping out her plan of attack. The first item on her list: a Rockstar Mickey Mouse doll, normally priced at $59.99 but selling for just $19.99.
"You have to have a strategy for this Black Friday madness," she said as she headed for the door. "First-timers will walk around all day looking at deals," Abbott said. "I got in, grabbed my stuff and got out." Her cart was overflowing with large toys — primarily Barbie and Mickey Mouse items.
PHOTOS: Black Friday shoppers hunt for deals
At a Wal-Mart in Panorama City, just after 8 p.m., "it was really crazy, but you could still walk," said Marya Huaman, 23, as she left the store with her dad, her two infant sons and three bags full of Fisher-Price toys.
"No, you couldn't," scoffed her father, Edward Huaman. "I didn't see anyone fighting, but they will be soon. This is madness."
Last year, Thanksgiving night was marred by a pepper spray "shopping rage" incident at a Wal-Mart in Porter Ranch that injured at least seven people and forced employees to evacuate part of the store. One person was hospitalized.
Los Angeles Police Cmdr. Andy Smith said Thursday that the night appeared to be running smoothly across Los Angeles. "In general, I think things have gone really well," he said. "It sounds like the stores have taken proper precautions and everyone is aware of the hazards of Black Friday."
After retailers last year moved the opening bell for Black Friday sales to midnight, this year there were even more customers eager to get a jump on the traditional kickoff to the holiday shopping season. Wal-Mart, Sears and Toys R Us began rolling out their door busters at 8 p.m. on Turkey Day, followed by Target at 9 p.m. Macy's, Kohl's and Best Buy were set to open at midnight.
A handful of chains such as Kmart and Old Navy also had daytime hours on Thursday. And online merchants were touting bargains all day and night.
About 147 million shoppers are expected this all-important holiday weekend, with more logging in for online specials by Cyber Monday, according to the National Retail Federation. In all, the trade group estimated that holidays sales will rise 4.1% this year, to $586 billion.
"Though the Black Friday tradition is here to stay, there's no question that it has changed in recent years," NRF Chief Executive Matthew Shay said in a statement.
Many shoppers were perfectly content to queue up. At Best Buy electronic stores across the Southland, people waited for hours — and sometimes days — in tents before the midnight opening.
But many workers were angry about spending Turkey Day away from loved ones.
Frustrated retail employees and families have taken to creating online petitions at Change.org to beg companies not to cut into Thanksgiving dinners. More than 20 online petitions have popped up in recent weeks. Lines grew throughout the afternoon and into the evening as anxious shoppers surveyed the competition in line.
Throughout Southern California there were reports of lines wrapped around stores. In Glendale, more than 750 shoppers were lined up outside the Target at the Galleria.
For shoppers who just couldn't wait until Thursday night — much less Black Friday — some retailers opened their doors all day on Thanksgiving.
The sales weren't quite as glorious as the Black Friday specials that stores promise to roll out later. But they were pretty good nonetheless, shoppers said.
JoAnne Garcia walked into Kmart in Burbank in search of a roasting pan in which to cook her turkey. She walked out 90 minutes later, having shelled out $491, including $329 for an RCA 39-inch LCD flat-panel TV.
"The roasting pan was $14.99," Garcia said, laughing at how much she spent as she rolled her cart to the parking lot.
To the 53-year-old aerospace machinist, shopping on Thanksgiving made perfect sense.
Standing near a store display touting "Freak Out Pricing," Garcia explained her theory about shopping while cooking. "You get up, throw your turkey in the oven, and you come back and it's all done."
walter.hamilton@latimes.com
joseph.serna@latimes.com
Contributing to this report were staff writers Wesley Lowery, Marisa Gerber, Nicole Santa Cruz and Andrew Khouri.
This colour-composite image was obtained by FORS1 on ANTU. It displays a sky area near the Chamaeleon I complex of bright nebulae and hot stars in the constellation of the same name, close to the southern celestial pole.This picture was taken a few days before the Paranal Inauguration and the "hand-over" to the astronomers on April 1, 1999.This colour composite photo of the Chamaeleon I area is based on six 1-min exposures obtained with VLT UT1 + FORS1 in the V, R and I bands. The sky field measures 6.8 x 11.2 arcmin2; North is up and East is left.
Image: ESO [high-resolution]
Caption: ESO
Subscribe to the Wired Science Space Photo of the Day
Follow Wired Science Space Photo of the Day on Twitter
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – The father of Halle Berry‘s daughter is headed to court after he was arrested following a fistfight with her fiancé outside the Oscar winning actress’ Los Angeles home on Thanksgiving, police said.
Canadian model Gabriel Aubry, 37, was later released on $ 20,000 bail after being charged with misdemeanor battery following the punch-up with Berry’s fiancé, French actor Olivier Martinez, 46, in the driveway of her house on Thursday.
The altercation occurred during a custodial hand-off involving Berry’s 4-year-old daughter with Aubry, Nahla, according to Los Angeles police officer Julie Boyer.
Following the scuffle, Aubry and Martinez were both taken to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center with “non-life-threatening injuries,” Boyer said. Aubry is due to appear in court on December 13.
Berry, 46, who won a best actress Oscar for her role in 2001 film “Monster’s Ball,” has been embroiled in a bitter custody battle with Aubry since they broke up in April 2010. Earlier this month, a judge denied Berry’s request to move to France with Nahla.
Berry and Martinez met while filming the movie “Dark Tide.” They announced their engagement in March.
A judge has since issued an emergency protective order requiring Aubry to stay at least 100 yards (meters) from Berry, their daughter and Martinez, according to celebrity website, TMZ.com.
(Reporting by Tim Gaynor; Editing by Sandra Maler)
DUBLIN — India’s ambassador here has agreed to ask Prime Minister Enda Kenny of Ireland for an independent inquiry into the death of an Indian-born woman last month after doctors refused to perform an abortion when she was having a miscarriage, the lawyer representing the woman’s husband said Thursday.
The lawyer, Gerard O’Donnell, also said crucial information was missing from the files he had received from the Irish Health Service Executive about the death of the woman, Savita Halappanavar, including any mention of her requests for an abortion after she learned that the fetus would not survive.
The death of Dr. Halappanavar, 31, a dentist who lived near Galway, has focused global attention on the Irish ban on abortion.
Her husband, Praveen Halappanavar, has refused to cooperate with an investigation being conducted by the Irish health agency. “I have seen the way my wife was treated in the hospital, so I have no confidence that the H.S.E. will do justice,” he said in an interview on Wednesday night on RTE, the state television broadcaster. “Basically, I don’t have any confidence in the H.S.E.”
In a tense debate in the Irish Parliament on Wednesday evening, Robert Dowds of the Labour Party said Dr. Halappanavar’s death had forced politicians “to confront an issue we have dodged for much too long,” partly because so many Irish women travel to Britain for abortions.
“The reality is that if Britain wasn’t on our doorstep, we would have had to introduce abortion legislation years ago to avoid women dying in back-street abortions,” he said.
After the debate, the Parliament voted 88 to 53 against a motion introduced by the opposition Sinn Fein party calling on the government to allow abortions when women’s lives are in danger and to protect doctors who perform such procedures.
The Irish president, Michael D. Higgins — who is restricted by the Constitution from getting involved in political matters — also made a rare foray into a political debate on Wednesday, saying any inquiry must meet the needs of the Halappanavar family as well as the government.
In 1992, the Irish Supreme Court interpreted the current law to mean that abortion should be allowed in circumstances where there was “a real and substantial risk to the life of the mother,” including the threat of suicide. But that ruling has never been codified into law.
“The current situation is like a sword of Damocles hanging over us,” Dr. Peter Boylan, of the Irish Institute of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, told RTE last week. “If we do something with a good intention, but it turns out to be illegal, the consequences are extremely serious for medical practitioners.”
Dr. Ruth Cullen, who has campaigned against abortion, said that any legislation to codify the Supreme Court ruling would be tantamount to allowing abortion on demand and that Dr. Halappanavar’s death should not be used to make that change.
Dr. Halappanavar contracted a bacterial blood infection, septicemia, and died Oct. 28, a week after she was admitted to Galway University Hospital with severe back pains. She was 17 weeks pregnant but having a miscarriage and was told that the fetus — a girl — would not survive. Her husband said she asked several times for an abortion but was informed that under Irish law it would be illegal while there was a fetal heartbeat, because “this is a Catholic country.”
With promotions, discounts and doorbusters already well under way on Thanksgiving Day itself, many big-box retailers are making Black Friday stretch longer than ever. The Lede is checking out the mood of American consumers in occasional vignettes Thursday and Friday as the economically critical holiday shopping season kicks off.
Members of the Attar family, Palestinians who were displaced during the eight-day conflict with Israel, return to their home in the Atatra area in the northern Gaza Strip on Thursday, a day after a cease-fire took hold. (Marco Longari / AFP/Getty Imagesa / November 22, 2012)
By Edmund Sanders
November 22, 2012, 10:14 a.m.
RAFAH, Gaza Strip – As the truce between Israel and Hamas appeared to be enduring through its first 24 hours, Gazans spent Thursday sweeping up, digging out and looking forward.
Hamas declared a public holiday, but most shops and many businesses opened their doors. Israeli warships were replaced on the horizon with Palestinian fishing boats for the first time in a week.
Having endured many conflicts, it’s a day-after drill Gazans know well. Residents who sought shelter in United Nations schools went home. A steady stream of families returning from Egypt arrived at the Rafah border crossing. Bulldozers tried to clear alternate roads around bombed-out bridges.
PHOTOS: Gaza conflict
Glass shop owner Kamal Habboush, 45, had seven walk-in customers by lunchtime to replace broken windows. Usually he’s lucky to have one.
But after 16 years in the business, he predicts the real rush won’t come for a few more days.
“People tend to wait to make sure the fighting is really over,’’ he said. “Just in case.”
TIMELINE: Israel-Gaza conflict
The eight-day conflict left at least 162 Palestinians and six Israelis dead. The Israeli military reported the sixth death Thursday, saying a soldier had died from injuries sustained in a rocket attack by Gazan militants, the Associated Press reported.
ALSO:
Gaza City's Mukhabarat building defies Israeli airstrikes
Israel-Hamas cease-fire gives each side enough to claim success
Judge questions former French leader Sarkozy in fundraising probe
Your corn is sweeter, your potatoes are starchier and your turkey is much, much bigger than the foods that sat on your grandparents’ Thanksgiving dinner table.
Most everything on your plate has undergone tremendous genetic change under the intense selective pressures of industrial farming. Pilgrims and American Indians ate foods called corn and turkey, but the actual organisms they consumed didn’t look or taste much at all like our modern variants do.
In fact, just about every crop and animal that humans eat has experienced some consequential change in its DNA, but human expectations have changed right along with them. Thus, even though corn might be sweeter now, modern people don’t necessarily savor it any more than their ancestors did.
"Americans eat a pound of sugar every two-and-a-half days. The average amount of sugar consumed by an Englishman in the 1700s was about a pound a year," said food historian Kathleen Curtin of Plimoth Plantation, a historical site that recreates the 17th-century colony. "If you haven’t had a candy bar, your taste buds aren’t jaded, and your apple tastes sweet."
The traditional Thanksgiving dinner reflects the enormous amount of change that foods and the food systems that produce them have undergone, particularly over the last 50 years. Nearly all varieties of crops have experienced large genetic changes as big agriculture companies hacked their DNA to provide greater hardiness and greater yields. The average pig, turkey, cow and chicken have gotten larger at an astounding rate, and they grow with unprecedented speed. A modern turkey can mature to a given weight at twice the pace of its predecessors.
In comparison with old-school agriculture or single-gene genetic modification, these changes border on breathtaking. Imagine your children reaching full maturity at 10 years old.
This human-directed evolution has generated animals and plants that share little more than a name with their wild or pre-industrial farm-domesticated relatives. The accumulation of agricultural breeding knowledge and consumer testing has resulted in plants and animals that are physically shaped by consumer tastes. Americans like a medium-size corn kernel, so kernels aren’t too big or small. American consumers like white meat, so turkeys are grown with larger breasts.
The breeding programs of the last half-century are, in some ways, a tremendous scientific accomplishment. For example, the United States pumped out 33 times more pounds of turkey at a lower cost to consumers in 2007 than our farmers did in 1929.
Turkeys more than doubled in size in that time from an average of 13 pounds to an average of 29 pounds, and as seen in the chart above, show no signs of stopping. If the trend continues, we could see an average turkey size of 40 pounds by 2020. According to the National Wild Turkey Federation, the largest wild turkey on record is 38 pounds.
In fact, in commercial and academic turkey-breeding programs, adult male turkeys, called toms, can reach 50 pounds at the tender age of five months, said John Anderson, a longtime turkey breeder at Ohio State University.
"We get 50 pounders at 20 weeks, but that’s at the top edge of our normal distribution," Anderson said. "We’ve got some adult male-line birds that went over 80 pounds."
Anderson, who has bred the birds for 26 years, said the key technical advance was artificial insemination, which came into widespread use in the 1960s, right around the time that turkey size starts to skyrocket. The reason is that turkeys over 30 pounds are "inefficient" breeders: It’s difficult for them to actually perform the natural mating act. With artificial insemination, the largest birds can still be used as sires, even if they have a hard time walking, let alone engaging in sexual reproduction.
"You can spread the one tom around better. It adds a whole new level of efficiency. You can spread him over more hens," Anderson said. "It takes the lid off how big the bird can be. If the size of the bird keeps them from mating, then you’re stuck."
This process, compounded over dozens of generations, has yielded turkeys with genes that make them very big. In one study in the journal Poultry Science, turkeys genetically representative of old birds from 1966 and modern turkeys were each fed the exact same old-school diet. The 2003 birds grew to 39 pounds while the legacy birds only made it to 21 pounds. Other researchers have estimated that 90 percent of the changes in turkey size are genetic.
Perhaps the most obvious change in turkey genetics is that, unlike the colorful pictures we all drew in elementary school, modern, factory-farmed birds are all white. The Broad Breasted White turkey became the dominant commercial breed in the middle of the 20th century.
These fast-growing, big birds are more energy efficient than their forebears. They can convert 2.5 pounds of feed into a pound of body weight. Legacy breeds take a longer time to add weight and can need over 4 pounds of feed to add a pound of weight.
But all that bulk comes with consequences. Commercial turkeys can’t fly and researchers have even invented a way of quantifying how impaired the birds’ walking has become. The 1-to-5 scale ranges from "birds whose legs did not have any defect" to bowlegged birds who have "great difficulty walking." After 30 years of breeding, Ohio State’s big birds average a 3.
The birds also have a hard time regulating their own food intake. In essence, they eat too much and get fat.
"Commercial broiler breeder strains, selected for rapid growth and high meat yields, do not adequately regulate voluntary feed intake commensurate with their energy needs," wrote two USDA scientists last year. "Consequently, these birds must be given a limited amount of feed to avoid overconsumption that can lead to excessive accumulation of energy stores [fat tissue]."
And some food lovers argue that fast growth and genetic change have robbed turkey meat of its distinctive taste. Some are turning to heritage-breed turkeys like the Blue Slate variety that pack pre-industrial genomes.
"One thing I would say about a modern turkey is that they have a lot less flavor," said food historian Curtin. "If you’ve ever had a chance to taste a heritage breed, there’s subtleties in turkey."
Turkey isn’t the only element of the iconic Thanksgiving dinner that science has given an overhaul. Corn breeding has made corn six times sweeter than the variations that the Pilgrims probably encountered back in 1620.
We eat a type of corn called, appropriately enough, sweet corn. The maize that American Indians grew in the 17th century would have been more like the type we feed to animals now, said Bill Tracy, a corn agronomist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
The maize would have looked like the ear pictured on the left. Eventually, this type of corn was crossed with the Virginia Southern dent on the right to create the field corn that we feed to animals. You wouldn’t want to eat any of these.
"It wouldn’t have been particularly sweet," Tracy said.
Sweet corn is the result of a mutation that replaces some of the corn’s starchiness with sugar. It spread from the Iroquois to European settlers in the late 1770s. While it’s considerably sweeter than the nasty stuff the Pilgrims ate — due to a mutation in a gene called Sugary1 — it wouldn’t taste much like the corn we know.
"From that time, it has gone through quite a few changes. Today, through conventional breeding, we have genes in it that make it sweeter, maintain its quality longer, and make it much more tender," Tracy said. "If people had the opportunity to taste Jeffersonian sweet corn and modern sweet corn, there’d be no question what they’d prefer."
That original sweet corn was only about 10 percent sugar, but it also was about 25 percent phytoglycogen, lending it a nice, creamy texture. In the next major corn transition — to supersweet corn in the 1970s through a variation in the Shrunken2 gene — that creamy texture was lost, even as the sweetness of the corn skyrocketed.
Among the thirteen genes known to affect corn sweetness, however, industrious agronomists have found an even better gene to work with, called SE, and they made "sugar enhanced corn."
"That’s the most popular for fresh market today," Tracy said. "It gives a sugar level of 20 to 25 percent and it turns out to be very tender."
But even as modern consumers prefer the SE corn — and often find the supersweet corn too sweet — the Shrunken2 corn is making a comeback as retailers prefer its longer shelf life.
Retailer and food processor demands, rather than your fresh-vegetable interests, play a major role in the evolutionary history of potatoes as well. Though they were not present at that original feast, they have been a major part of the holiday since Lincoln created it in 1863.
Potatoes are now driven by a decidedly nonfestive activity: the making of french fries and potato chips. Almost a mirror of corn genetics, agronomists have ratcheted up the starch in potatoes and turned down the sugar, said Gregory Porter, a potato specialist at the University of Maine.
"High-starch french fries, when they fry, don’t get soggy," Porter said. "Low sugars are important because high sugars in potatoes would result in a dark brown discoloration. High-starch potatoes result in a nice golden-colored fry."
So the modern potatoes of today, even the round ones that look more like their colonial predecessors, have undergone major biological changes.
"When you look at potatoes that would have initially come in the 1700s, those potatoes weren’t being selected for processing ability," Porter explained. "Those potatoes probably would have been round and had lower starch content and high sugars. They would not have made good french fries or potato chips."
WiSci 2.0: Alexis Madrigal’s Twitter , Google Reader feed, and webpage; Wired Science on Facebook.
LOS ANGELES (AP) — The producers of “The Price is Right” owe a former model on the show more than $ 7.7 million in punitive damages for discriminating against her after a pregnancy, a jury determined Wednesday.
The judgment came one day after the panel determined the game show’s producers discriminated against Brandi Cochran. They awarded her nearly $ 777,000 in actual damages.
Cochran, 41, said she was rejected when she tried to return to work in early 2010 after taking maternity leave. The jury agreed and determined that FremantleMedia North America and The Price is Right Productions owed her more than $ 8.5 million in all.
“I’m humbled. I’m shocked,” Cochran said after the jury announced its verdict. “I’m happy that justice was served today not only for women in the entertainment industry, but women in the workplace.”
FremantleMedia said it was standing by its previous statement, which said it expected to be “fully vindicated” after an appeal.
“We believe the verdict in this case was the result of a flawed process in which the court, among other things, refused to allow the jury to hear and consider that 40 percent of our models have been pregnant,” and further “important” evidence, FremantleMedia said.
In their defense, producers said they were satisfied with the five models working on the show at the time Cochran sought to return.
Several other former models have sued the series and its longtime host, Bob Barker, who retired in 2007.
Most of the cases involving “Barker’s Beauties” — the nickname given the gown-wearing women who presented prizes to contestants — ended with out-of-court settlements.
Comedian-actor Drew Carey followed Barker as the show’s host.
___
Anthony McCartney can be reached at http://twitter.com/mccartneyAP .
Newly released documents add vivid detail to the emerging portrait of the Food and Drug Administration’s ineffective and halting efforts to regulate a Massachusetts company implicated in a national meningitis outbreak that has sickened nearly 500 people and killed 34.
In the documents, released on Tuesday in response to a Freedom of Information Act request, the agency would threaten to bring the full force of its authority down on the company, only to back away, citing lack of jurisdiction.
The company, the New England Compounding Center, at times cooperated with F.D.A. inspectors and promised to improve its procedures, and at other times challenged the agency’s legal authority to regulate it, refused to provide records and continued to ship a drug in defiance of the agency’s concerns.
Some of the documents were summarized last week by Congressional committees that held hearings on the meningitis outbreak. Republicans and Democrats criticized the F.D.A. for failing to act on information about unsafe practices at the company as far back as March 2002.
By law, compounding pharmacies are regulated primarily by the states, but the pharmacies have grown over the years into major suppliers of some of the country’s biggest hospitals. The F.D.A. is asking Congress for stronger, clearer authority to police them, but Republicans have said the agency already has enough power.
Records show that the agency was sometimes slow in pursuing its own inspection findings. In one case involving the labeling and marketing of drugs, the agency issued a warning letter to New England Compounding 684 days after an inspection, a delay that the company’s chief pharmacist complained was so long that some of the letter’s assertions no longer applied to its operations.
The agency said in a statement Wednesday that it “was not the timeline we strive for,” but that much of the delay was because of “our limited, unclear and contested authority in this area.” Because of litigation, it said, there was “significant internal discussion about how to regulate compounders.”
The agency first inspected the company in April 2002 after reports that two patients had become dizzy and short of breath after being injected with a steroid made by the company.
On the first day of the inspection, Barry Cadden, the chief pharmacist, was cooperative, but the next day, the agency inspectors wrote, Mr. Cadden “had a complete change in attitude & basically would not provide any additional information either by responding to questions or providing records,” adding that he challenged their legal authority to be at his pharmacy at all.
The F.D.A. was back at New England Compounding in October 2002 because of possible contamination of another of its products, methylprednisolone acetate, the same drug involved in the current meningitis outbreak.
While the F.D.A. had the right to seize an adulterated steroid, officials at the time said that action alone would not resolve the company’s poor compounding practices. In a meeting with Massachusetts regulators, F.D.A. officials left authority in the hands of the state, which “would be in a better position to gain compliance or take regulatory action,” according to a memo by an F.D.A. official summarizing the meeting.
David Elder, compliance branch director for the F.D.A.’s New England District, warned at the meeting that there was the “potential for serious public health consequences if N.E.C.C.’s compounding practices, in particular those relating to sterile products, are not improved.”
The company fought back hard, repeatedly questioning the F.D.A.’s jurisdiction. In a September 2004 inspection over concerns that the company was dispensing trypan blue, a dye used for some eye surgeries that had not been approved by the F.D.A., Mr. Cadden told the agency inspector that he had none in stock.
But in the clean room, the inspector noticed a drawer labeled “Trypan Blue,” which contained 189 vials of the medicine.
A few days later, Mr. Cadden was defiant. He told the agency that he was continuing to dispense trypan blue and that there was nothing in the law saying a compounder could not dispense unapproved products.
The conversation turned testy. “Don’t answer any more questions!” Mr. Cadden told another pharmacy executive, according to the F.D.A.’s report.
Mr. Cadden rejected many of the assertions in the warning letter that finally came in December 2006. The next correspondence from the agency did not come until almost two years later, in October 2008, saying that the agency still had “serious concerns” about the company’s practices, and that failing to correct them could result in seizure of products and an injunction against the company and its principals.
It is not known whether any corrective actions were taken. The agency did not conduct another inspection until the recent meningitis outbreak.
From left, Tara Niebeling, Sarah Schmidt, Bridget Jewell and Erin Vande Steeg are members of the social media team at the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minn.
Retailers are trying to lure shoppers away from the Internet, where they have increasingly been shopping to avoid Black Friday madness, and back to the stores. The bait is technological tools that will make shopping on the busiest day of the year a little more sane — and give shoppers an edge over their competition.
Those with smartphones in hand will get better planning tools, prices and parking spots. Walmart has a map that shows shoppers exactly where the top Black Friday specials can be found. A Mall of America Twitter feed gives advice on traffic and gifts, and the Macy’s app sends special deals for every five minutes a shopper stays in a store.
“The crazy mad rush to camp out and the crazy mad rush to hit the doorbusters have really made people think, ‘I’m just going to stay home on Black Friday,’ ” said Carey Rossi, editor in chief of ConsumerSearch.com, a review site. “This is going to invite some people back and say, ‘You know what? It doesn’t have to be that crazy.’ ”
Part of the retailers’ strategy is to slap back at online stores like Amazon.com, which last year used apps to pick off shoppers as they browsed in physical stores. But the stores are also recognizing that shopping on the Friday after Thanksgiving need not require an overnight wait in line, a helmet and elbow pads. A smartphone gives shoppers enough of an edge.
“This takes away that frantic Black Friday anxiety,” said Lawrence Fong, co-founder of BuyVia, an app that sends people price alerts and promotions. “While there’s a sport to it, life’s a little too short.”
Denise Fouts, 45, who works repairing fire and water damage in Chandler, Ariz., is already using apps to prepare for Black Friday, including Shopkick, Target’s app and one called Black Friday. “There still are going to be the crowds, but at least I already know ahead of time what I’m going specifically for,” Ms. Fouts said.
Last week, Macy’s released an update to its app with about 300 Black Friday specials and their location. In the Herald Square store, for instance, the $49.99 cashmere sweater specials will be in the Broadway side of the fifth-floor women’s department.
“With the speed that people are shopping with on Black Friday, they need to be really efficient about how they’re spending their time,” said Jennifer Kasper, group vice president for digital media at Macy’s.
When shoppers keep the app open, Macy’s will start sending special deals to the phone every five minutes. The deals are not advertised elsewhere.
Walmart has had an app for several years, but recently introduced an in-store mode, which shows things like the current circular or food tastings when a shopper is near a certain location. Twelve percent of Walmart’s mobile revenue now comes from when a person is inside a store.
For Black Friday, the app will have a map of each store, with the precise location of the top sale items — so planners can determine the best way to run. “The blitz items are not where you think they would be, because for traffic reasons, maybe the hot game console is in the lawn and garden center,” said Gibu Thomas, senior vice president for mobile and digital for Walmart Global eCommerce.
Target is also testing a way-finding feature on its app at stores that include some in Seattle, Chicago and Los Angeles. If a shopper types in an item, the app will give its location.
Other app makers are betting that shoppers want apps that pull in information from a range of stores.
RedLaser, an eBay app, lets shoppers use their phones to compare prices and recently started using location data to give shoppers personalized promotions when they walk into stores, including items not on store shelves at Best Buy, for instance. RetailMeNot, which offers e-commerce coupons, now has offline coupons that will pop up on users’ cellphones when they step near 500 malls on Black Friday.
“Consumers are not going to download 40 different apps for 40 different stores,” said Cyriac Roeding, co-founder of Shopkick, a location-based app that gives shoppers points, redeemable for discounts or gifts, when they walk into stores or scan certain items.
Subscribe to the Wired Science Space Photo of the Day
