Friday Morning in Elmhurst: Black Friday Shopping at the Queens Center Mall

Around 8 a.m., four hours after the stores opened for Black Friday shopping early-bird specials, we arrived via the G, E and M trains at Woodhaven Boulevard and Queens Boulevard to brave the crowds at the Queens Center mall.

From the outside, everything looked peaceful

from the middle island as we carefully crossed the Boulevard of Death,

but this was the most crowded, hectic Black Friday we remember. The economy must be getting better, or else people finally can't put off buying stuff they need anymore.

Almost everywhere we went in the Queens Center, there were crowds. Many with shopping bags. Some with lots of shopping bags.


Teens seemed to dominate the crowds. Teens with money.

By far, the most crowded stores we saw were the teen-oriented American Eagle and Aeropostale, which had a humongous line just to be allowed to enter the store.

The Guess store was doing a big business. Since our dad was guest's Florida and Puerto Rico menswear sales rep through most of the 90s, often making a six-figure income on his commissions, we feel somewhat loyal to them, and the Bugle Boy and Sasson labels he represented in the 80s.



Pink was very pink and very crowded,

and H & M, which had some incredibly good bargains, had such a long for the cashiers that we passed up some wonderful cheap clothes we liked. We always heard our garmento family members describe stores that we saw today as "mobbed." "Mobbed" meant money.

This Black Friday looked as if a lot more people were spending money than they did in 2008 at the Triangle Junction and Atlantic Terminal malls or in 2009 at Kings Plaza.

A line of about thirty Newtown High School students stood on Queens Boulevard as we left the mall. Like students at Brooklyn's John Dewey and Sheepshead Bay High Schools and others, they were protesting the threatened (scheduled?) of Newtown.

They told us there'd be an 11 a.m. rally at the nearby Newtown High School Field. So many Brooklyn and Queens high schools that our friends and relatives went to have closed since we returned to the city four years ago. We have a good friend who went to Newtown in the late 60s, so we wish them luck.

Speaking of back in the day, this is the way we remember the Queens Center mall from the 1970s.

It opened in September 1973,

three years after Kings Plaza (just a few blocks from our house), and we spent a surprising amount of time here for a Brooklyn boy.

But by then we had our own car, a brand-new dark gold Mercury Comet, and even with the Arab oil embargo, we loved to drive. Queens was a nice easy escape, so we came here often. Although we'd worked at Alexander's in Kings Plaza in the fall of '74 (another recession year), our favorite department store, A&S, was here,

and one of our favorite restaurants, Cooky's.

And Ohrbach's had been a good customer for the men's slacks manufactured by our grandfather and father at the family business, Art Pants Company, which would go under in that '74-'75 recession after being in business for over fifty years.

In Spring in Brooklyn, the fourth of the sixth volumes of The Brooklyn Diaries: 1969-1980, we record one day, for example, when we got out of a funk partly by coming to the Queens Center and hanging out and shopping. We were 23 then, in our first year of the MFA program in creative writing at Brooklyn College, had finished our coursework and just turned in our thesis for our MA in English at Richmond College, and were teaching our first college class ever at Long Island University's downtown Brooklyn campus:

Wednesday, April 30, 1975

Agony, however painful, always ends. It was that way with my depression of yesterday.

It was that way with the long, tortuous war in Vietnam, which ended yesterday.

Big Minh, the third president of South Vietnam in a week, surrendered unconditionally to the Communists, and U.S. Marines got the last of our countrymen out of Saigon. Today the Viet Cong is in complete control and Saigon has been renamed Ho Chi Minh City.

Getting back to my depression, it ended without warning. I forced myself to take a drive over to the Queens Center because I could not bring myself to go to the Fiction Workshop.

In Ohrbach’s and in A&S, I looked at men’s clothes, just feeling the fabrics and looking at the beautiful shirts and pants. Most of them were beyond my means, but I did find a lovely black knit shirt reduced for clearance to $2.99 and I bought it.

Suddenly I realized that the tight mass somewhere in my gut had disappeared. I had supper at home and went to LIU, where I filled my class in on what we’d be doing for the next three weeks.

I was a bit dull last night, but just the fact of getting up in front of fifteen people, most of whom are older than me, and being a teacher was good enough for me to feel somewhat triumphant.

Libby called me when I got home. She’s going on a canoeing trip this weekend and asked if I could type up a paper for her. She offered to pay me, but that isn’t necessary – anything to feel useful.

Steve called, too. He’s been busy working on an Architecture paper and “partying” at Le Jardin and Hollywood and other places like that.

I slept poorly, anxious about teaching again tomorrow (but I only have five more classes left) and filled with sexual tension with nowhere to go. I really need to make love twice a night. All this garbage about being asexual and sublimating is just that: garbage.

I need to release myself physically more. That cropped up in a long letter I received from Professor Ebel this morning. He wrote it on Sunday, after finishing my stories.

He says he plans to give me Honors for the thesis, providing Prof. Leibowitz agrees. Henry writes that he likes my writing, “which ranges from brilliantly inventive to no lower than a high plod.”

Today we were grateful to hang out at the Queens Center more than 35 years after that day. And we were grateful to plod back to Williamsburg and write about it.

Wednesday Morning in East Mesa: Christmas Eve Shopping at the Signal Butte Wal-Mart SuperCenter

After getting the New York Times and iced tea at the Starbucks on Signal Butte Road in far east Mesa near our house this morning, we moseyed over to the shopping center across the street to check out Christmas Eve shopping at the Wal-Mart SuperCenter.

It was just 9 a.m., but we thought the store would be more crowded.

The Great Recession has hit this part of the Phoenix metro area hard, with lots of foreclosures and a halt and reversal of the phenomenal Arizonan growth early in this decade (our house was bought in 1999).

Where we live, the Apache Junction unified school district, whose greatest problem always seemed to be keeping up with demands of an exponentially growing community, is now contemplating closing two schools due to fewer students.

Although yesterday's Census figures show Arizona still growing slightly, local leaders suspect the numbers are a desert mirage and that Cactus State growth is at a standstill or even declining like our former home state of Florida.

Still, we were surprised by the empty aisles and lack of shoppers. Of course, maybe everyone did their Christmas shopping on time. Or maybe the last-minute people will come later in the day.

Anyway, according to the New York Times blog Bucks yesterday:

Retailing groups...have been noticing that shoppers have been procrastinating a bit more than usual this year. According to the National Retail Federation’s 2009 Holiday Consumer Intentions and Actions Survey, conducted by BIGresearch and released last week, the average person had completed 46.7 percent of their holiday shopping by the second week of December, less than the 47.1 percent completed by this time last year and the lowest percentage since 2004.

But most of the people at the cash registers seemed to be buying groceries, not gifts.

Certainly, a few people were stocking up on Christmas presents, but we didn't see much evidence of frantic last-day shopping here.

Of course, we have nothing to compare what we saw today with, so this could be a very good Christmas shopping season for all we know.

Through the 1980s and early 1990s, our family had a place at the Fort Lauderdale Swap Shop, the South's largest flea market, and we were highly attuned to the ups and downs of Christmases in years of recession and boom.

For the sake of the 2010 economy and our fragile recovery, let's hope everyone got out and spent more than we did.

After paying about $16 for socks and underwear - with only one guy with one item ahead of us at the cash register - we headed home to Apache Junction. As often as we see it, we're always in awe as we approach majestic Superstition Mountain.

Merry Christmas!

Friday Morning at The Junction & Downtown Brooklyn: (Not So Much) Black Friday Shopping at the Triangle Junction & Atlantic Terminal Malls

Getting to the Triangle Junction Mall at 8 a.m., this morning we saved hundreds of dollars on this day after Thanksgiving. A few hours later, we saved even more a few miles up Flatbush Avenue at the Atlantic Terminal Mall. How did we save this much money? We didn't buy anything on Black Friday, merely watched others doing so.

And from the look of things, this recession/ depression is severely crimping sales as strapped consumers behave more like us than they do normal people.

At 7:10 a.m. we caught a southbound B48 bus on our corner of Lorimer Street, took it through various enclaves of Williamsburg, Bed-Stuy and Crown Heights to Eastern Parkway, where we hopped on a 2 train to Flatbush Avenue/Brooklyn College.

As a pre-teen in the Kennedy administration, "going to the Junction" was a big treat for us, though it usually meant getting glazed donuts and comic books and window-shopping around what was the closest thing to a shopping area we could get to from Flatlands on the B41 bus.

By the end of the 1960s, we were jaded by our every-weekday trips as a student at Midwood High School and Brooklyn College, and these days we make the trip twice a week from Williamsburg to teach classes in creative writing and the short story, not to shop.

Passing a dozen or so Jehovah's Witnesses ladies at the train station, we made our way to the new Triangle Junction Mall between Nostrand and Flatbush Avenues on what used to be municipal and private parking lots where we kept our gold '73 Mercury Comet when we couldn't find a meter or a legal space anywhere else.

The mall's main store is Target, the fourth in Brooklyn, opened just last spring. Of course, the Circuit City in the same mall, which opened later, is already closing as that company, bankrupt, is forced to liquidate. Three people with big signs announcing the end of Circuit City, if not the world, are strategically placed on different corners, including in front of the elevator to the subway station.

Target usually opens when we get there at 8 a.m. but today it opened at 6 a.m. for the Black Friday rush. Except when we take the escalator up, the store looks pretty empty for such a big sales day.

Where are the frantic mobs that traumatized us eight years ago - the only other time we went to a store on Black Friday - at the now-shuttered Mesa, Arizona, K Mart on Dobson and Broadway? We got to that store at 7 a.m. and were swept in with the huge crowd and found all the "doorbuster" bargains sold off before we came to them.

Today, at Target, it turned out there was no rush. Indeed, most of the big sale items will still be on sale on Saturday. There's almost no one at the checkout counters except a little Orthodox Jewish boy whose mom is buying an Elmo's World Record-and-Play Center and a Muslim lady in a head scarf with a huge box containing something called a "Storm Rocker" with some kind of wireless POD or something for $44. We looked at the boxes of it piled high and still aren't sure what it does.

There are a lot of other big boxes of stuff practically being given away that few people want, although we are tempted by a $29 Dirt Devil vacuum cleaner. The aisle to the escalator up is clear, and the Menswear section looks more like Ghosttown, with one young Caribbean-American couple and two gay teenage boys languidly looking at bargains they don't seem to be all that interested in.

Passing sales items we have no use for - stacks of $69 pink Disney Princess bikes and $79 blue Marvel Spider-Man bikes; a Hamilton Beach Classic Hand/Stand Mixer for $25, an 8-bottle wine cooler - we see the electronics section has more action. Electronic keyboards, wide-screen TVs, and other stuff are getting sold, but the crowds aren't nearly as large as we expected.

If we were seven years old, on our wish list would be one item on special sale at Target: the $19.99 Easy Bake Oven and Snack Center so we could, as the sign said, "Discover the excitement of REAL BAKING!"

But the first light-bulb-powered version of the Easy Bake Oven appeared when we were 12, too old for it.

So for Xmas/Chanukah 1959 we had to settle for this huge realistic-looking car dashboard - which no doubt led at age 16 to our sneaking illegal drives around Mill Basin in our mom's fire-engine red Valiant and relying on girls to bake Alice B. Toklas brownies a couple of years later.

Circuit City was just sad. Most of the good stuff in the mammoth store is already gone, since those going-out-of-business signs have been around for weeks.

It reminds us of the sad day in the summer of 1997, when we we were traveling from Manhasset to Williamsburg when we stopped off at Main Street in Flushing and got to experience the last day of the fabled five-and-dime Woolworth chain. (One of the main hangouts of the Sultans - the not-so-bad-boys gang, um, club - we belonged to circa "I Wanna Hold Your Hand" - was the Woolworth's at the strip shopping mall on Ralph Avenue near Flatlands Avenue.) That Flushing store looked forlorn, and so did everyone in it.

Ditto this doomed Circuit City, and seeing a pre-teen girl holding a give-it-away T-Pain CD and a videotape of the complete first season of One Tree Hill is truly depressing.

There were pretty long lines for the B41 bus going to Kings Plaza, the mall that opened in September 1970 three blocks from our old house - and where our dad and uncle had a store and where we often went with our college friends for lunches at Cooky's or The Crepe and the Pancake or to movies on Friday night and where we worked in Alexander's Department Store in the menswear department, near our friend Marilyn Citron at the cash register, as we kept straightening out the tables of puckery polyester pants and the racks of powder blue leisure suits.

So perhaps New York City's first indoor shopping mall was busier. The B41 Flatbush Avenue bus - and the Q35, which stops across from Kings Plaza on its way to Rockaway - were too crowded for us to want to travel down that particular retail memory lane, so we opt for a road closer and less traveled by.

We retreat to the Hillel Place Starbucks - a long time ago the site of the legendary Campus Sugar Bowl greasy spoon where Andreas and the Cypriot Greek guys behind the counter would call us "Blondie Boy" when we ordered our chizburger and lime rickey. (Their lime rickeys were the best.) We read the day's Times, with a front-page article headlined "Retailers Offer Big Discounts, and Then Pray" and the big op-ed piece, "Dying of Consumption," saying:

There is a deeper, potentially positive, meaning to the decline in consumer spending: Americans are now moving back to more prudent income-based lifestyles.

We look across to the McDonald's and remember a group of us going there to try it the day it opened in 1971. Shocked to see Brooklyn College President John Kneller there, we asked him what he was doing with a double cheeseburger in his hands. "Why not?" the French scholar said. "It's nutritious and inexpensive."

A few years later we'd go there regularly as an MFA student with our mentor, the BC fiction writing program director Jonathan Baumbach, who always spent less than we did because he had his Big Mac Attack Pack booklet of discount coupons - which, being legendarily cheap (yes, that part of Noah Baumbach's The Squid and the Whale is based on reality), he never shared with us, when we were earning the minimum wage of $2 an hour.

Going back to the Junction, we pass a bunch of stores replacing the long-gone places we loved: the Campus Corner restaurant, the Barron's and Barchas bookstores, the Campus Closet menswear store where our friend Brian McNeela worked and whose owner was a customer of our dad's Art Pants - and so we got this wonderful white wool crew-neck sweater with occasional colorful threads in the weave for almost nothing. Having our whole family in the garment business meant that we didn't buy retail until we were in our forties.

We take the 2 train to Franklin Avenue, spot a 4 and take it one stop to skip Eastern Parkway- Brooklyn Museum, Grand Army Plaza and Bergen Street, and get to Atlantic Avenue two minutes faster. The Atlantic Terminal mall is indeed crowded, and we go upstairs to check out the Target.

Reportedly the number-one store in sales in the entire Target chain, this one is more bustling than its sister at the Junction, but given the highly-trafficked, high-population area, it's not a Black Friday madhouse by any means. A few years ago, this would have been a typical Saturday afternoon.

At 11 a.m. now, we walk around and notice that not one of the 25 or so checkout counters has more than three people waiting to have their purchases rung up. A Target employee is directing those with fewer purchases to express lines on the Atlantic Avenue side of the store, but they don't seem much faster. It's all pretty quick. We've waited on longer lines here in the summer of 2006.

Anyway - did we tell you we hate shopping? - we left the busy-but-not-superbusy mall and walked our oft-trod route around the Williamsburg Savings Bank Building (One Hanson Place, for those who don't miss the dentists), BAM, and that little triangle park that no one seems to have to the key to, and entered the G train station at Fulton and Lafayette for our ride back to Williamsburg and the end of our Black Friday no-shopping free.

Total amount spent: $2.34 on the venti black iced tea at Starbucks. It would have been $2.60 but we have the new 10% discount card that Starbucks started giving out when it began closing its stores and losing customers due to the bad economy.

We're spending the rest of the day reading one of our favorite authors who tried to tried to sue us: E.L. Doctorow. Welcome to Hard Times.