Black Friday parking survey

[Veloise]

Almost everyone goes past, if not into, a retail parking lot on the Friday after Thanksgiving. (Well, not my sister, avidly supporting Buy Nothing Day, but she lives in Ohio.)

Here comes our once-in-a-year opportunity to take an admittedly unscientific look at the acres of parking surrounding various attractive nuisances.

Let's post some results. Are the lots packed with stacked and circling cars waiting for their turn, or is it major overkill?

(I'll be looking at urban design in Houston)

[Rizzo]

I just started working in retail and found out that in the business its "Green Friday," and you ladies have 75% of control on family expenses. Our parking lot has about 80 spaces. Although, our "overfill" is World Market/strip mall which has a few hundred spaces. It's already picking up in volume.

[tamias6]

Well from my prospective Thanksgiving de-evolved from a stand alone holiday to a point as to serve as nothing more than a gatway to the feeding frenzy that is the Christmas shopping season. That said it could be Friday, Monday, or even a Wedsday, and the the parking lots of Big Boxes and Shopping Malls are going to be jammed pack. Woodland and Rivertown even have police directing traffic during the holidays. Shoot even going to Meijer just to buy some stinking groceries can be like riding a little kids tricycle into the middle of a Bumber Cars ride. As much as I hate the look of alsphalt seas I must say they are needed esp. when the Christmas Spirit is annually drilled into our skulls by capitalistic propaganda and thus every square inch of asphalt in the US becomes insufficient to accomadate the hords of shoppers that will fight to the death to buy the next Tickle-Me Elmo.

That's why I do my Christmas shopping through out the whole year.

[Allison Slater]

Rizzo, are you still in Schaumbag or are you working near the place where I've spent more money than any place else? (Guitar Center)

Oh forgot why I was originally going to post.

I've heard that at Menards last year there was a line on Clyde Park just to get into the Menards parking lot. And they have what seem to be an otherwise grossly oversized parking lot. In fact I think I heard that a few employees had to park at Steak & Shake just to get to work.

[GRDadof3]

I was just reading that the day after Thanksgiving is no longer the big Christmas shopping day ("gone the way of the dodo bird" as one expert put it). It's the unveiling of new tech games like last week's PS3 and last year's XBox360 that are now the big blast-off to the holiday shopping season.

[Nitro]

I was just reading that the day after Thanksgiving is no longer the big Christmas shopping day ("gone the way of the dodo bird" as one expert put it). It's the unveiling of new tech games like last week's PS3 and last year's XBox360 that are now the big blast-off to the holiday shopping season.

[Veloise]

...As much as I hate the look of alsphalt seas I must say they are needed esp. when the Christmas Spirit is annually drilled into our skulls by capitalistic propaganda and thus every square inch of asphalt in the US becomes insufficient to accomadate the hords of shoppers that will fight to the death to buy the next Tickle-Me Elmo....

[tamias6]

I guess nobody remembers last Christmas when GR made local headlines and even CNN when people were trampling all over each other to get in the Cascade Wal-Mart on 28th street. That must have been a sight.

[Rizzo]

Rizzo, are you still in Schaumbag or are you working near the place where I've spent more money than any place else? (Guitar Center)

Oh forgot why I was originally going to post.

I've heard that at Menards last year there was a line on Clyde Park just to get into the Menards parking lot. And they have what seem to be an otherwise grossly oversized parking lot. In fact I think I heard that a few employees had to park at Steak & Shake just to get to work.

[Allison Slater]

I would doubt that the game console release dates are replacing black fridays. They may replace the event for which Black Friday is named (turning a first profit for the year) but even still I find that difficult to believe. Meijer was shipped 300 Nintendo Wii consoles chain-wide, leaving only a handful for each store. Take that $250 plus an extra wiimote and a game and you've got about $400. Assume each store has about 10, so that's $4000. Considering a lot of grocery trips run up to $80 (based on remembering what my parents would spend each saturday when I was a kid) that's like 50 extra customers during the day, which is only a small portion of the amount of customers I would expect a store to get in one day.

Granted, the PS3 was much more expensive, but Sony has also produced much less as well (as always.)

On top of this, these companies actually lose money on the consoles, selling them to distributors for cheaper than it costs to actually make the consoles. These companies rely on game sales to turn a profit. So, I would imagine Nintendo, Sony, and MS are not selling to distributors very cheaply, and the stores may not actually be making that much profit from these.

I would assume most of this attention is actually in regards to the dedication of the gamers who wait in lines for 2 days or more to be the first with the console, and especially with the rash of crime and violence surrounding the PS3 due to its high demand and value. These things can easilly make these release days seem as a bigger deal than Black Friday, when in reality they may not be for the stores.

[Rizzo]

I don't know much about these gaming consoles, but I think I read somewhere that Sony is loosing some $245 on each PS3 they sell.

[monsoon]

Instead of shopping (which I don't do anymore) I took my camera out a couple of years ago to document the insanity. This is a post I made from one of them. I thought it might be worth reposting in this thread.

------------------

I saw this sight this weekend and thought that it deserved a photo. This is

1/2 of a Super Walmart. It was so large could not get it all into the shot from that hill.

6000 years of recorded human history has resulted in this. Not sure

what words that would apply but maybe you can provide your own.

Location - Stankwell Falls, NC (but could be Anyplace, USA)

Time - 10 minutes into the future

[GRDadof3]

Uggh, Wal-Mart.

Last week's release of Playstation 3 was just as bad, where lines formed days before and someone was shot outside a Wal-Mart.

But back to your questions Veloise, the parking lots they have definitely get filled to capacity and beyond. I couldn't believe it one year when I saw people parking at D&W across from Rivertown Crossings and walking to the mall (because their lot and ramp were full). It's even worse if we have a big snowfall before Christmas and people can't or don't park within the lines.

[torgo]

I think those huge parking lots are built for one or two weekends out of the year, when they get close to capacity. But that begs the question: is it worth it? I wish there was something else that could be done with the mostly empty parking lots the other 99% of the year

I stay home the day after thanksgiving because I think its completely insane. Besides, I've usually ate and drank enough on thanksgiving that the idea of going to Walmart at 5 AM doesn't sound like a good time.

I love watching the news though, where it shows 40-year-old moms and dads beating each other up over parking spaces and electronic gizmos. Great entertainment!

[michaelskis]

While some of the stores look at trying to have as much parking as possible, many of them work to meet those municipalities minimum requirements. Most places regulate base number of parking places on a combination of the following:

Usable Square Footage

Number of seats/ Chairs (movie theaters, sit down restaurants, barber shops, and such)

Number of teller counters (Banks and other service places)

Number of employees

I think that everyone should encourage the GR and the surrounding cities to reduce the number of required number of off street parking places.

[AlexPKeaton]

A lot of parking could be eliminated by clustering businesses with different peak times together. Traditional downtowns are the perfect example of this: office workers in the day, bars/arena events at night. The can draw from the same pool of parking at different times. Does anything like this truly exist in suburbia?

-nb

[Allison Slater]

In suburbia everybody tries to do everything at once. They go to supermarket, and while they're out they decide to stop eveywhere else so they can do it all in one trip wihle they're out. So even businesses with different peak times would just kinda become the same. The only businesses I can think of that would do this are resturaunts, nightclubs, and banks. Nightclubs don't seem to work in suburbia very well, so it's just a matter of putting resturaunts near banks. Not enough to really make a difference.

[Nitro]

I think those huge parking lots are built for one or two weekends out of the year, when they get close to capacity. But that begs the question: is it worth it? I wish there was something else that could be done with the mostly empty parking lots the other 99% of the year

[mcheiss]

I'm feeling generous, so I'll go ahead and post this here. This is a list of most of the Big Box stores Black Friday Ad's.

Enjoy.

Black Friday Ad's

[TheCityGuy]

For the record...the Saturday before Christmas has taken over as "the biggest shopping day of the year".

http://www.boston.com/business/globe/artic...r_black_friday/

[jstalin]

Yeah....I don't think so. Anyone remember the video of last years debacle at a local Target (?) store that made CNN Headline news?

Black Friday is alive and well..........

[GRDadof3]

For the record...the Saturday before Christmas has taken over as "the biggest shopping day of the year".

http://www.boston.com/business/globe/artic...r_black_friday/

[Rizzo]

That was the walmart in Cascade. I remember sitting at my sister's in Washington DC that morning, watching the news, and seeing the caption at the bottom of the screen. I laughed my rear end off. Youtube has a copy of the video here:

Watch for flying wigs!

[Allison Slater]

That was mis-labeled as an xbox360 stampede. I don't think the 360 brought that many people (or that demographic of people) into those stores. And that was in Cascade last year.

[Veloise]

Instead of shopping (which I don't do anymore) I took my camera out a couple of years ago to document the insanity. This is a post I made from one of them. I thought it might be worth reposting in this thread.

...

Location - Stankwell Falls, NC (but could be Anyplace, USA)

Time - 10 minutes into the future