Bleary-eyed Black Friday shoppers seek deals overnight at The Citadel Outlets

Black Friday shopping started early at the Citadel Outlets in Commerce with some stores opening their doors for overnight bargain hunters.

Several shoppers were at the mall late Thursday after Thanksgiving dinner and stayed into the early morning hours for a marathon day of bargain hunting on what is considered the start of the holiday shopping season.

One family arrived late Thursday in an effort to visit as many stores as possible.

“We go to every store we can,” one shopper told NBCLA in a line outside the Coach store early Friday. “We have to hit all of them up.

“We got here as soon as we could. We got here right after dinner, so like around 11 p.m.”

An Early Access Black Friday Sale began at 8 p.m. Thursday for what was billed as an all-night shopper party. Most stores will stay open until 11 p.m. Friday.

That’s 27 hours straight of shopping.

The shoppers were among about 131.7 million people nationwide who plan to shop in stores or in person Friday, according to an annual survey released Nov. 14 by the National Retail Federation conducted by Prosper Insights & Analytics. That figure is part of a record 183.4 million planning to shop between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday.

“What’s happened most over the last five years is the acceleration of the beginning of Black Friday sales,” Lars Perner, an associate professor of clinical marketing at the USC Marshall School of Business, said in an interview posted on the school’s website. “We’ve seen, for example, Amazon especially coming up with a lot of the early sales. That means competitors have to follow. When Amazon does something, then Walmart and many others will do the same, and the brick and mortar stores have to follow along. The arms race, so to speak, has begun earlier and earlier.

“There’s no limit to how far back you can get things. There used to be some cultural reaction to having sales too early, but increasingly people have come to expect it. Some people might philosophically bemoan it, but there’s not that same visceral reaction anymore.”

The previous record was 182 million set in 2023.

The survey found 72% of holiday shoppers plan to shop in stores or online Friday, including 65% who plan to shop in stores.

The top reasons consumers plan to shop during this five-day period are because the deals are too good to pass up (57%), it is tradition (28%) and they like to start holiday shopping over Thanksgiving weekend (24%).

City News Service contributed to this report.