Business

Teens Hit the Malls Hard at Midnight on Black Friday

Black Friday crowds strike as early as midnight in Massachusetts (and earlier elsewhere). AP

By Adam Vaccaro

November 26, 2014

2 minutes to read

You know who goes shopping at midnight on Thanksgiving? Teenagers, that’s who.

I went out and covered one of these things a couple of years ago for The Patriot Ledger and I’ve heard stories from others who have been to more. What we saw: teens, teens, and more teens. Just legions of teens, everywhere.

All the hype of midnight shopping, with shoppers lined up outside the doors to get their mitts on big ticket items, has some basis in reality. While interest in late-night Thanksgiving shopping is down this year, a good 18 percent of U.S. adults who plan to shop Thanksgiving weekend say they could hit the stores the night of the holiday. Join them, and you’ll surely find plenty of adults, there to either save some money for the holidays or to treat themselves to something nice.

But surveys about Thanksgiving weekend spending tend to focus on those adults—people over the age of 18. That ignores the masses who really turn out for the event. Those adult shoppers at the mall? To find them, you’ll have to pluck them out of an ocean of kids.

I asked a number of shoppers who have been out to the malls around midnight approximately how many teens were out there. The lowest figure I got, from a Cape Cod Walmart, was 30 percent. The estimates were much higher for stores inside actual shopping malls: 60 percent teens in South Portland, said one shopper. Seventy percent at the Burlington Mall, said another. And a security guard at one Eastern Massachusetts mall who has worked a few of these things estimated that a full 85 percent of the midnight arrivals were teenagers.

Late-night Thanksgiving shopping is still too fresh a phenomenon to have generated much in the way of demographic data, said Marshal Cohen, a retail analyst with New York-based consultancy NPD Group—so take those shoppers’ eyeball estimates above with a grain of salt. But it’s obvious enough to many retailers that the youths make up a massive portion of Thanksgiving night crowds, Cohen said.

“For teenagers, it’s become a new holiday to-do,’’ Cohen said. “From college kids home for break all the way down to junior high.’’

Cohen said he intends to work through the sales data this year to see how the age-based demographics shake out. But for now, he said, the teen-centricity is reflected in the types of products that carry doorbuster deals. You’re unlikely to see a high school kid standing in line for a new TV. But with so many teens coming out to shop, in recent years things like cosmetics and clothing—more likely purchases for that demographic—have received the deep-discount treatment as well.

“Retailers are learning,’’ Cohen said. “What’s the right product at the right time?’’

Then again, the shopping aspect of Black Friday is probably a secondary concern.

“It’s the perfect excuse to have a midnight rendezvous with friends, and with their parents’ permission,’’ Cohen said. “It’s an opportunity to socialize in the late-night hours.’’

Which, come to think of it, sounds an awful lot like most malls on most days.

As for me, Thanksgiving is a wonderful but exhausting holiday, and by midnight I’ll be asleep. The shoppers among you, have fun. You’ll find deals aplenty at America’s biggest high school dance.