Anooshka Kumar, 20, of San Jose waits in line to buy a pair of half-price boots as she and other shoppers take advantage of Black Friday sales at Cathy Jean in Westfield Valley Fair Mall in San Jose Friday Nov. 25, 2011. (Photo by Patrick Tehan/Mercury News)
Today: Anecdotal evidence shows that moving Black Friday sales up to midnight an earlier reached a new breed of bargain shoppers: teens and twentysomethings. Also: Wall Street doesn't do much in a shortened session, but Netflix (NFLX) and Groupon still continue to fall; and AT&T looks to sell mor of its business to save T-Mobile merger.
The cool things to do: Young people hit Black Friday sales
By moving Black Friday up to Thursday night, retailers may have found a new breed of bargain shoppers: Young people, who reportedly turned out in droves for store openings at midnight and earlier.
While an age shift in Black Friday shopping would be hard to quantify, reporters and store employees gave plenty of anecdotal accounts of large groups of teens and twentysomethings exploring area retail stores past in the wee hours of Black Friday.
"There are a lot of teenagers and young adults in the mall this year," Julie David, a Concord resident, told Bay Area News Group reporter George Avalos at Concord's Sunvalley mall past midnight. The experienced Black Friday shopper definitely noticed a different clientele mix during this year's shopping spree, she said.
Kim Souza, of Castro Valley, noticed the same phenomenon at Stoneridge Mall in Pleasanton, saying "There
are a lot of young people here, a lot of kids," said.As Bay Area museums such as the DeYoung in San Francisco and the Oakland Museum of California have discovered with overnight events, offering services late at night can lure large groups of young people who would typically be together at parties, restaurants or bars. So stores not only get an interested shopper, but also their friends who come along just for the ride.
"It was definitely a younger customer, under 20 for the most part, and they were shopping in groups of friends, four and five at a time," Macy's CEO Terry Lundgren told Bloomberg News, speaking of an incredible crowd of up to 10,000 waiting for the chain's flagship store in Manhattan to open at midnight. "It was almost a continuation of whatever social experience they were having hours before."
Some stores were especially targeted by younger customers. This video of a swarm of shoppers at a Modesto Victoria's Secret location is almost exclusively populated by young women who appear to be in their teens or 20s. Mall favorites such as Forever 21, and malls in general, were popular as well.
The one drawback to bringing large groups of young people out for Black Friday sales is that they might not all be shoppers, but just along for the ride.
Sarah Ward and Marisela Rodarte, both from Fremont, captured some deals at the Forever 21 store in NewPark Mall in Newark Thursday night, but they also said it was the spectacle that brought them out.
"Coming out here tonight is more for the excitement than the deals," Ward told Avalos while admiring the crowds coursing through the shopping center.
The early start to the biggest shopping day of the year brought large crowds, and analysts said early signs were good for a big day for retailers, though mostly built on deep discounts. Craig Johnson, president of consulting firm Customer Growth Partners, predicted to Bloomberg News that revenue in the first 24 hours of Black Friday could jump 8 percent from last year to $27 billion.
Online sales are looking to grow even more. Revenue from the Web gained 39 percent on Thanksgiving, according to IBM's Coremetrics, and shopping on mobile devices was responsible for 11 percent of those sales, an increase from about 4.3 percent a year earlier.
For full Black Friday coverage, read our full live blog as well as this Storify wrap-up of arrests, crowds and craziness from YouTube and Twitter.
Short session caps depressing week for Wall Street
Most traders on Wall Street seemed to have Thanksgiving leftovers on their mind Friday, as volume was light on the stock exchange in a shortened session. However, all three major indexes lost ground, capping off the worst week for stocks in two months.
The Dow Jones and S&P 500 indexes both lost more than 4.5 percent on the week, their worst since late September. And tech stocks that were hurting earlier in the week continued to slide, especially Netflix. The Los Gatos streaming-video and DVD-by-mail company has suffered since selling bonds and stock to add $400 million to the company coffers, and Friday was no different: The stock dropped 6.8 percent.
Groupon's slide slowed but didn't cease on Friday, as the Chicago daily-deals originator -- which fell below its IPO price for the first time on Wednesday -- lost another 1.2 percent to close at $16.75. LinkedIn, which also debuted on Wall Street this year, continued to fall since its lockup ended along with a secondary offering of almost 9 million shares. The Mountain View professional-networking company's share price dropped 4.4 percent to $63.08.
AT&T, in fight with DOJ and FCC, looks to S-E-L-L
With all eyes on turkeys, AT&T and T-Mobile pulled back on the two companies' proposed merger Thursday, asking the Federal Communications Commission to pull their application for the move so they can focus on a lawsuit from the Justice Department.
As that drama continues -- the FCC said it would "consider" allowing the move, which led AT&T to threaten a lawsuit forcing the government to stop considering the current proposal -- AT&T is reportedly looking into selling more of its business to fight the Justice Department's antitrust lawsuit.
Bloomberg News reported that AT&T will look to increase its divestitures to help the deal go through. However, the more AT&T sells, the harder it will be to find a buyer; and if the buyer is another large wireless company, such as Verizon, the same antitrust issues may arise.
"It's very hard to envision a solution that would satisfy the problems the DOJ found with the deal," Craig Moffett, a Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. analyst, told Bloomberg.
Silicon Valley tech stocks
Up: Yahoo (YHOO), Tesla, Cisco (CSCO), Intel
Down: Netflix, LinkedIn, Nvidia, Juniper, VMware, Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), Google
The tech-heavy Nasdaq composite index: Down 18.57, or 0.75 percent, to 2,441.51
The blue chip Dow Jones industrial average: Down 25.77 points, or 0.2 percent, to 11,231.78
And the widely watched Standard & Poor's 500 index: Down 3.12, or 0.27 percent, to 1,158.67
Check in weekday afternoons for the 60-Second Business Break, a summary of news from Mercury News staff writers, the Associated Press, Bloomberg News and other wire services. Contact Jeremy C. Owens at 408-920-5876; follow him at Twitter.com/mercbizbreak.
