Maybe this is how our Black Friday is supposed to look.
In Ottawa people dragged themselves out of bed early to stand in the cold outside stores, some opening as early as 6am.
But the line-ups were in the dozens, not the hundreds.
And when the doors opened there was no trampling rush, no fights, none of the scenes that we’ve seen coming out of some stores in the U.S. and U.K.
Is this Black Friday, Canada-style?
“We’re too polite and we don’t care about a sale as much as we do about being nice, I think,” muses Britney Amarica while buying a TV at a local Best Buy.
Don’t let the decorum fool you. Many retailers still reported a brisk Black Friday business. “Not like the massive line-ups in the morning, just a constant business all day long,” says Mark Lalonde, Manager of the Best Buy on Coventry Road in Ottawa.
Black Friday came to Canada. It just didn’t seem to come with the same fervour as in the U.S.
Maybe it’s because Black Friday is still relatively new north of the border.
Maybe it’s because many local retailers have quickly turned it into Black Friday Week.
Maybe it’s because Canada’s traditional busiest shopping day is Boxing Day – a holiday not shared in the U.S.
Or maybe it’s simply a case of savvy shoppers.
Like many stores, Best Buy allowed shoppers to reserve merchandise online 24 hours in advance. By 2pm, Lalonde says they had processed upward of 400 online orders in his one store alone.
Tim Boehm did just that for his Black Friday buys, meaning there was no need to line up early. “No, but I had to stay up late to order it yesterday to reserve it,” he adds.
Whatever the reason, Black Friday hasn’t taken on the manic proportions we’ve seen south of the border.
At least not yet anyway.
