To the west, in the parking lots of Best Buy and Wal-Mart and Staples and Sports Authority, it was controlled chaos. To the east, on the narrow Missoula downtown roads, it seemed like just another workday, maybe a few more feet on the street.
To the south, at the mall, pandemonium reigned, parking spots were at a premium and checkout lines stretched up and down the aisles.
“I went to the Home Depot and Lowe's this morning to do some business, and it was darn near impossible to stay out of the way of the crazy shoppers,” said one man, who wasn't keen on giving his name but did offer his profession - home renovator.
He was right. It's hard to really take to heart the economic prognosticators, who have been forecasting a lackluster shopping season, when sidestepping a miniature tent city and elbowing your way through Best Buy on Friday morning in hope of scoring a $229 laptop computer.
By 8 a.m., the tents were down and those 60 or so Toshibas - marked down $450 and surreptitiously advertised on the Bestbuy.com Web site - had passed through the checkout line.
“We wanted to get two for the kids, and when we got here, they were all gone,” said Jason Johns, who went shopping with his wife. “They're probably going to get on eBay and sell them for a thousand bucks and deprive our kids of a good education.”
All joking aside, the Johnses kept up their shopping Friday, hoping to score another deal on a laptop for the kids.
“We'll probably still end up getting them one, but it won't be that good of a deal,” he said.
Lured by $770 high-definition LCD televisions, $5 movies, $19 4-gig Flash drives and $19 DVD players, thousands of Missoulians turned North Reserve and Southgate Mall into a traffic nightmare that would make Seattle commuters envious.
At least 40 people braved the near-zero temperatures by camping overnight at Best Buy, the giant electronics retailer. Inside the store, people waited more than an hour in a line that measured 246 paces, snaking through the store's aisles and delineated by blue tape.
That's just the sort of crowd that Leah Lusher could never put up with.
“I'm just not that nuts,” she said at the Trail's End. “I'd rather be home snug as a bug.”
Where does Lusher do her shopping, then? She pointed to her laptop.
“It takes a lot of the stress out of it,” she said.
She's hardly alone. Economists expect online shopping to top $30 billion this year, a 20 percent increase over last year.
But what about the stores that have no fancy Web site, the ones that don't discount
80 percent - the local shops downtown? Well, the popular wisdom is that Black Friday skips them almost entirely, and a check of the morning foot traffic seemed to confirm that wisdom.
“We don't really rely on this day because everybody is out on North Reserve,” said Kristal Cowart, manager of the Import Market downtown. “We don't have sales. We have the same deals all the time.”
Whether holiday shopping at the Import Market is robust this year will be determined in the coming weeks, said Cowart, not on a single day.
“It is our busiest month of the year, comparable to our July and August,” she said.
Reach Jamie Kelly at 523-5254 or at jkelly@missoulian.com
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