Post-Midnight ‘Mystery’ Doorbusters Give Little Incentive to St. Louis Shoppers

ST. LOUIS -- Late-night mystery deals at two St. Louis-area electronics stores didn’t elicit the frenzied response that doorbuster come-ons have wrought historically, we found in a tour of Best Buy and h.h. gregg stores Thanksgiving night into Black Friday morning.

Stanchions had been set up outside the Best Buy store in Chesterfield, Mo., where some customers began assembling at 6 p.m. Wednesday in 20-degree temperatures for the 8 p.m. doorbusters on Thanksgiving, said store manager Scott Roseberry. “There were no tents this year,” he said, in contrast to the past couple of Black Fridays when people camped out for deals, primarily on TVs. The 40-50 customers who were in line at 3 p.m. swelled to 400 or so after Thanksgiving dinner was over in many households, he said.

While traffic since the 6 p.m. opening had been steady, Roseberry called this season -- with staggered deals, an early Thanksgiving open and a 26-hour straight run through 10 p.m. Friday night -- “completely different” from Black Friday events in years past. Store traffic had been “steady, while controlled -- not chaotic,” he said.

We counted at least 200 consumers at midnight at the Best Buy store, but shoppers strolled through the store at a leisurely pace more in line with Saturday afternoon browsing than typical Black Friday mania. The checkout line was short and moved quickly, with most shoppers picking up a few small items, rather than larger, more expensive TVs and PCs. A Blu-ray bin with $3.99 sale-priced titles was a popular spot. Danny, from Chesterfield, nabbed a Google Chromecast he had seen advertised for $25, down from $35, as an “easy Christmas gift.” He looked at an Ultrabook, but it wasn’t on sale and he decided to wait until it was before buying. Danny just happened to be in the store at midnight, not for the mystery doorbuster opportunity, but “because Macy’s was mobbed” and “there was nothing else to do."

Although Best Buy was prepared to line up customers outside for the midnight mystery doorbusters, there was no line when we arrived at 11:20 p.m., despite the deals having been announced at 10 p.m. online. By 11:45 tickets were still available for the limited number of mystery deals, including 12 tickets assuring a customer an Xbox One for the $499 price. Other midnight doorbusters included a Canon camera bundle, LG 32-inch TV for $299 and several TV show season series on Blu-ray for $19.99, and only the allotted deal tickets for the Blu-ray discs had disappeared. The Best Buy Mobile section was busy but the line was short. A man waiting for the free Samsung Galaxy S4 (with two-year contract) was called to checkout before we could ask about his shopping experience. He was out at midnight for the deal that “was too good to pass up."

Most of the 8 p.m. Best Buy doorbusters, led by a second-gen 16 GB iPad ($100 off to $299) evaporated right away, Roseberry said. But some, including Microsoft’s $199 Surface tablet, didn’t sell out and deals were extended past the 9 p.m. cutoff, he said.

At the Walmart a few stores down, some 10 of 25 cash registers were lit but the store was quiet just after midnight. We found Jodie waiting at the electronics counter to see if Walmart, in accordance with its holiday price-matching policy, would equal the Best Buy doorbuster price of a $299 iPad 2 since Best Buy had run out. She had been shopping since late afternoon and had been squeezed out of an iPad mini deal at another Walmart some 20 minutes away, where she had received a wristband for the 16 GB model. When a store employee brought her a 32 GB model instead, she was told at checkout it didn’t qualify for the deal, and she left empty-handed and somewhat bitter. After a 20-minute wait at this Walmart, she got her price match after showing a clerk her Best Buy circular and yelled, “Success!” to us as she left the store with her shopping buddy. They were headed to the next destination on their Black Friday excursion, an annual tradition for her and her friend, who planned to be out until stores closed at 10 Friday night.

Next we found Karen, who had driven about 15 minutes from University City to shop at what she said she expected would be a “more quiet” Walmart than ones closer to her house. But she missed out on the Skylanders Swap Force starter pack doorbuster ($38.96, down from $74.96) that had sold out. We asked her about an RCA soundbar she had just put back on a shelf after changing her mind about that purchase. “It had all the right features” -- Bluetooth and a remote control -- but the one she had at home cost $300-plus and she was sure the sound quality would suffer in the cheaper model. What she really wanted was a Samsung soundbar to match her TV so she wouldn’t have to have two remotes, she said. Karen had to be careful not to buy anything she didn’t really need this year “because I'm very conscious of my budget.” She wasn’t alone, she said, having just come from Best Buy where “everybody in line had one item,” she said.

From Walmart, we headed a few blocks down the road to h.h.gregg, which had published its mystery doorbusters online that were due to kick in at 1 a.m. Where Best Buy was buzzing with customers, h.h. gregg was quiet and staffers outnumbered the shoppers. A couple of customers were in the appliance section and we found one person shopping for TVs. He came in looking for Black Friday deals and was told by the salesman that there wasn’t much incentive for consumers to seek out deals on Thanksgiving or Black Friday since Black Friday sale prices had been in place since Tuesday.

H.h. gregg had a line of customers waiting at the door when its doors opened at 8 Thanksgiving night, General Manager Amy Sikorski told us, but she wasn’t sure of the count. The store had sold out of two of its five TV doorbusters -- including a 60-inch LG TV for $599 and a 55-inch Seiki model for $399. Deals were still available for a few remaining 51-inch Samsung TVs ($429 down from $549) and a 22-inch Seiki TV knocked down to $79 from $139. We counted 28 boxes on the floor with the $149 Haier 32-inch TVs left over from the 8 p.m. doorbuster promo.

No one in the h.h. gregg store appeared to be there for a 1 a.m. mystery deal, we found. Sikorski told us the 1 a.m. mystery doorbusters were sent to customers based on their previous shopping purchases, although we found the list of four doorbusters revealed on the website before we went to the store. The four items were a George Foreman plate grill, a 10-inch 4 GB Android tablet ($99 down from $149), a Samsung 43-inch TV (25 percent off to $299) and a treadmill. We asked a salesman about the mystery price TV but he wasn’t familiar with it.

The leader deal in the DVD player aisle was a compact DVD player for $19.99, whose price included, like many of the TV deals, a mail-in rebate. The customer we spoke to “hates rebates” and was looking instead at a Sony Blu-ray player, marked down from $119 to $54.

H.h. gregg’s Sikorski, like Best Buy’s Roseberry, praised this year’s elongated store hours. Both stores opened earlier than usual on Thanksgiving and were to remain open until Friday night. That gave managers the opportunity to have more normal shifts for workers, who got breaks, the managers said. The number of staffers clearly outnumbered the people shopping at 1 a.m. at h.h. gregg, though, leading us to wonder if the salaries that store had to pay employees for late-night hours were worth the receipts. When we left, there were four customers in the store.

The dearth of early-morning Black Friday foot traffic at h.h. gregg wasn’t due to lack of shopping interest in suburban St. Louis. A Starbucks shop a few blocks down the road had numerous customers at 1:15 a.m., and there were at least 15 shoppers at a Bath & Body Works store next to Best Buy. A nearby outlet mall was half-packed with cars, with more cars piling in as we passed. A local radio station reported earlier in the day that an outlet mall was running shuttle buses from a parking lot at nearby Spirit of St. Louis Airport for overflow parking. We ended the night feeling Thanksgiving night shopping was here to stay, if not at h.h. gregg.

That led us to wonder what that meant for the true Black Friday, which has morphed from being a specific day to becoming a November retail mindset. We headed to a Walmart in Maplewood, Mo., where the parking lot was about half full at about 7:30 a.m., ahead of the 8 a.m. doorbuster deals. Three Maplewood police cars near the store entrance appeared to have a calming effect. There was no indication of trouble in the store, although we overheard customers speaking of a melee on Thanksgiving over a doorbuster in another section of the store.

We expected to find the electronics section brimming with iPhone hopefuls, waiting to snag a 5c for $45 or a 5s for $189 in the 8 a.m. doorbuster sale -- along with a $75 Walmart gift card. Instead, we had to ask where the line was for the phones. Customers trickled in and a dozen or so people were in line for the phones by the time we left just after 8 a.m. It seemed they would all leave with what they came for, if not the exact color they wanted. A store employee told us there were 35 iPhone 5c phones in stock for AT&T customers and five 5s models. There were about half that number of each for Verizon customers, she said. Prerna, from Olivette, arrived at about 7:55 to get a 5c. When asked the color she wanted, she said, “Any I can lay my hands on.” The saleswoman told her white, blue, and green were in stock but pink had sold out.

Andy, from nearby Clayton, had misread the Walmart circular online, and came in 6 p.m. on Thanksgiving for the iPhone deal, he said. “It was a madhouse,” he said. The parking lot was jammed and cars were lined up on side streets, he said. Kelsey, from Granite City, Ill., was happy stores had opened on Thanksgiving but not because she shopped then. “If they hadn’t opened last night, it would have been crazier today,” she said.

Despite published reports out of southern California about three fights at a Walmart store in Rialto on Thanksgiving Day, Walmart spokesman David Tovar sent out a release Thanksgiving night citing “strong and safe” events across the country where the mood overall was “crowded but calm.” In a news release Friday morning, Walmart said more than 5 million customers participated in Walmart’s one-hour guarantee sale for 21 products in promotions held at 6 p.m. and 8 p.m. on Thanksgiving. Between 6 p.m. and 10 p.m., Walmart processed more than 10 million register transactions in stores, it said. Walmart also reported 400 million page views on Thanksgiving, including from mobile devices.

Last year, 22 million customers shopped at Walmart on Thanksgiving Day, and this year “even more customers chose to shop Walmart,” the chain said. Whether that’s true store to store isn’t clear. We overheard one employee say to another at the Chesterfield, Mo., Walmart store at about 12:30 a.m. Friday: “I think it was a mistake to open on Thursday.” Doorbuster receipts at that store were down about $50,000 by having sales at 6 and 8 p.m. on Thanksgiving “rather than on Friday,” she said.