LEXINGTON, Ky. (LEX 18) — This is not what I was expecting!
A Black Friday on the roads in and around the shopping centers is supposed to be the stuff nightmares are made of: Fifty cars waiting at the left turn signal, which remains green for all of four seconds. Jammed packed parking lots, which leave you begging for a space, any space, even one that might be hundreds of yards from your desired destination. And check-out lines long enough to make you wonder if the 50% you’re saving on that Kindle is really worth the time you’re losing off of your life.
But today we found the remedy to Black Friday shopping. It was the Hamburg Shopping center where the parking was plentiful, and customers were breezing through the check-out lines as if it were a Saturday morning in April.
“Here, today it’s like a normal day, almost,” said Neal Edwards, who was back at Best Buy for the second time today. “Walmart was chaos! Chaos it was, it was crazy,” he said of the midnight doorbusters at the Hamburg location. But it wasn’t anything like that when we caught up at around 10 o’clock this morning.
Perhaps everyone did their shopping after finishing off dessert last night, or maybe it’s the Cyber Monday effect? Others reported similar experiences here this morning and into the early afternoon hours.
“It was fine inside there, no problems with the crowds,” Lori Angel said of the Hamburg Target. “We started at Fayette Mall and then came over here, got parking spaces, crowds aren’t bad at all,” she continued.
We know it wasn’t the weather, because today was about as normal as it can be for a day in late November. In fact, Angel said there was really only one issue with the Black Friday shopping today. (Lack of) “money,” she said tongue in cheek when asked if there was a shortage of anything yet in the stores.
Daimler Miller drove in from Bath County. He had money in his pocket and a plan his mom came up with years ago.
“Wake up at 4 a.m. so you can skip all the mayhem. You might miss the off-the-shelf-deals, but the deals are going to be all day, so you skip the traffic. Saves a lot of headache and commotion.” But most of all, he said, the pre-dawn shopping means you can, “avoid running into rude people.”
In the Hamburg section of Lexington, many chose to avoid all of it. At least for a good portion of Black Friday.
