Pandemic Changes Thanksgiving and Black Friday
December 3, 2020
This pandemic has caused many restrictions and changes for the holidays, including the usually lively Thanksgiving and Black Friday. The Thanksgiving holiday that typically has families across America get together around one big table wasn’t as big this year, and many fewer shoppers swarmed to stores the next day.
Junior Saana Mohammed said that this year she couldn’t see other family members and didn’t have a big gathering like past Thanksgivings.
“I wished we could’ve seen more people, but I still had a good time with my family,” Mohammed said.
Melanie Gloster, who is also a junior, said this Thanksgiving just consisted of her brother, mother and herself.
She said she learned through this experience that “family really matters, without family it is pretty much boring and feels like a normal day.”
The Friday following Thanksgiving was the infamous Black Friday, which marks the beginning of Christmas shopping season. This is usually the time of the year when holiday sales of retail stores cause their customers to go into a frenzy, but this year is noticeably different.
Gloster’s family usually goes shopping on Black Friday and waits in the crazy long lines, but they didn’t this year in order to stay safe from the Coronavirus.
Many people opted to shop online and avoid going in store shopping. Black Friday traffic this year went down as many people and stores try to avoid big crowds in the name of social distancing.
The number of in-store shoppers on Black Friday dropped by 37 percent from last year, according to the National Retail Federation. However, Black Friday and Saturday saw growth in online activity, the federation said.
“For the first time, the number of online Black Friday shoppers passed the 100 million mark, up 8 percent over last year,” the federation said. “The number of online Saturday shoppers grew even more, up 17 percent compared with last year.”
