Long Island shoppers headed to malls and stores on Black Friday to keep family traditions alive, as retailers attempted to lure them away from their homes with sales, Santa visits and even snacks.

The day after Thanksgiving has lost some significance as a sales bonanza, but shoppers from Uniondale to Riverhead told Newsday they enjoyed venturing out to try on clothes and scout deals.

People still arrived early at Roosevelt Field in Uniondale, the Island's largest shopping mall, to be among the first inside when it opened at 6 a.m.

"It's a tradition for me. I've been doing this for 30 years," said Garden City resident Cira Rom, 48, who got to the mall with her three teenage daughters before dawn for Christmas shopping. 

Foot traffic was light at many Long Island stores early Friday morning but had picked up to solid crowd numbers at some locations by the afternoon.

Consumers will need strong motivation to open their wallets this holiday season, with inflation-fatigued shoppers looking for big sales before spending, said retail experts, who expect total holiday spending to increase modestly compared to the 2023 season.

The five-day period between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday is also declining in significance as retailers offer deals weeks or months earlier.

“Gone are the days of people lining up at the doors ready to kick them in for doorbusters and sprint through the mall,” said Michael Brown, a partner and Americas retail leader at Kearney, a consulting firm in Chicago.

But Black Friday is still the most popular day for holiday shopping.

For Carole Pentzel, Black Friday is not about the sales.

She said she used to line up at 2 a.m. to get gifts for her two children. But this Black Friday meant lunch and then shopping with three of her grandchildren. She and Peyton Mitchell, her 14-year-old granddaughter, ventured into Kohl’s in Shirley Friday afternoon so the teen could pick out perfume at Sephora to gift to her best friend.

“I’m here to shop and let them buy whatever they want,” Pentzel, 73, of Manorville, said  after Peyton helped her cross the parking lot back to the car. “I just love to be with them and let them shop … It’s time together.”

Some retailers were able to generate excitement on Black Friday with special items, such as Target’s in-store exclusive release of “Taylor Swift | The Eras Tour Book,” which drew long lines outside the stores before they opened at 6 a.m., said Marshal Cohen, a chief retail adviser who works in the Port Washington office of Circana, a Chicago-based market research firm.

“The stores all got about 500 books [each] and most of the books were close to sold out within 25 minutes,” he said.

Nationwide retail spending in November and December is projected to grow 2.5% to 3.5%, reaching $979.5 billion to $989 billion, according to the National Retail Federation, a Washington, D.C.-based trade group.

Last year, holiday sales increased 3.9% from the 2022 season. This year’s NRF forecast is in line with the pre-pandemic average annual holiday increase of 3.6% from 2010 to 2019, according to the trade group, which does not adjust its numbers for inflation.

Comparing deals

The roads leading to Riverhead's Tanger Outlets were choked with traffic in the mid-morning hours Friday.

A pajama-clad Christian DiGilio, 20, and his friends were among the crowds that visited Tanger in Riverhead before sunrise hoping to land some door busters at clothing stores. DiGilio, a YouTube content creator from Franklin Square, said it's a tradition among his friends but he didn't see much in the way of deals. 

Instead, he found himself walking into stores like Abercrombie & Fitch, looking at their sales, and comparing them to online prices.

“Honestly, I’m finding better deals online right now,” he said.

U.S. online sales are projected to hit a record high of $240.8 billion in November and December, an 8.4% increase over the two-month period last year, according to Adobe, a San Jose, California-based software company.

Adobe said consumers spent a record $6.1 billion online on Thanksgiving, which was up 8.8% from spending on that day last year. Sales on mobile devices represented nearly 60% of that total, according to the company.

Amber Arshad, 31, of Mastic, has shopped on Black Friday since she was a teenager and brought her daughter along for her first day-after-Thanksgiving retail adventure at Old Navy in Shirley. 

“I used to go with my cousins to the outlets, we would buy winter coats, winter boots,” Arshad recalled of her early Black Friday experiences, while her four-year-old daughter Amalia Eve, played with a Rubik's cube. While she still maintains her tradition, she said she will sometimes find “a better deal” online.

Many Shirley shoppers said they will both click “add to cart” and wait in line for Christmas gifts this year. But those picking up clothes for themselves on sale Friday said they prefer to leave the house.

“We get a lot of clothes and it’s nice to be able to try everything on,” said Catherine Tinti, 23, of Medford.

“Make sure it fits, make sure you like the feel,” added her brother, Jonathan Tinti, 19, of Medford.

Elsewhere in Riverhead, foot traffic was light in the early afternoon at Walmart, where customers exited the big-box retailer with largely empty carts, holding more grocery items than gifts. German Palacios, 34, an East Hampton resident, came lumbering out of the store, wheeling a large flatscreen TV on a dolly. He was there to swap the TV for one he picked up five days earlier that he said didn't work.

“I got a good deal on this,” he said, as he loaded the flatscreen into the back of his car, his wife Shannon and his two young children looking on. “It was $500. I saved like almost $200.”

Palacios, who does tree removal work in Southampton, said Black Friday shopping was “like a tradition” with his father growing up. He recalled having to buy a tent when waiting for stores to open because it was so cold outside.

“It’s not like back in the day when people would sleep outside,” he said.

Sean Duford, 53, a Medford native who moved to Raleigh, North Carolina, came to the Tanger outlets in Riverhead around 10 a.m. to “tag along” with his mom and sister. He said they venture out on Black Friday every year.

Duford, who was carrying two large bags from Columbia’s factory outlet, said initially he “was trying not to” shop, but got caught up in the deals with an additional nudge from his wife, Marleida.

He said he was trying to watch his spending, citing the higher cost of essentials.

“I think people are a little more conscious about how they spend this year," he said.