Consumers are shrugging off the slow economy and packing shopping malls from one end of Greater Boston to the other this Black Friday as the holiday-shopping season officially gets under way.
“I have to say it’s been the busiest opening I’ve seen in a long, long time,” said Vicki Bartkiewicz of Braintree’s South Shore Plaza, where some stores opened shortly after midnight. “I’m seeing some people with five, six — seven bags of gifts.”
Some 600 people were queued up outside of the mall’s Macy’s store when it opened at 12:30 a.m., while a line stretched hundreds of feet outside of the nearby Target.
In Wrentham, Al LaRocco, 22, of Warwick, R.I., waited for about two hours outside the Sony store at the Wrentham Village Premium Outlet. He was among the first in at midnight, and quickly picked up a 40-inch flatscreen TV for $430.
“I had a limit of 450 bucks,” he said. “If I found a good deal I was going to go a little over. If I found a really good deal I was going to go a little under. We were in line for about two hours, and spotted this in the window.”
Last night was LaRocco’s first Black Friday experience — and even though he picked up the TV, he’s probably spending less this year during the holiday season.
“I just recently moved out by myself,” he said. “So my bills are expensive. I also recently lost my job. It happens, I’ll get another one. But I wanted a TV, you know? Moving out, I need a television set.”
A Sony store employee said the store expected to sell $500,000 worth of merchandise on Black Friday, and expected the crowd to stay steady for about six hours. The TVs, which comprise half the store’s usual business, were a hot item, along with $400 Vaio laptops.
Around the corner, waiting outside the Coach handbag store, which was offering a 30 percent storewide discount, Scituate’s Julianna Gratta, 25, said she was shopping for herself last night, but likely wouldn’t be spending as much overall this year.
“I’m trying to be good with my money,” Gratta said. “Times are tough.”
Gratta started waiting in line at about 10 p.m. for the midnight opening with her friend Lauren Morin, 25, of Brockton, and Morin’s sister-in-law Pamela Morin, 27, of Falmouth.
Pamela Morin, a director at Bayada Nurses, was shopping for Coach bags for her employees.
“I’m going to be spending a heck of a lot more, because I got a promotion,” she said.
“I want to be one of her employees,” her sister-in-law added.
By 1:30 a.m., the line at Target at South Bay in Dorchester, which opened at 1 a.m., had dissipated, but the store was still busy. Across the parking lot at Best Buy, which opened at the same time, the line still snaked around the corner.
Mattapan’s Melvin Best, 23, picked himself up a Sony PlayStation 3 video game console for $200.