Black Friday enough to test a worker’s sanity

Published 10:49 pm Friday, November 23, 2007

It’s 1 a.m. and Geordy Greene is awake.

It’s time to get up and go to work.

The 30-year-old Gold Bar man works as a manager at the Best Buy in Everett. On Black Friday, the first day of the holiday shopping season, he’ll work a 14-hour shift that begins while most people are still snoozing off their turkey dinners.

“Some people spend the day shopping,” he said. “I spend all day working.”

He knows the stakes are high for his company. The day after Thanksgiving is the Super Bowl of shopping, one of the few moments when customers line up to spend big bucks. It’s also a chance to set the tone for the rest of the season. The company estimates this is the first time 60 percent of the people coming through the door have shopped here this year.

“This is our chance to make a good impression,” Greene said. “We want people to come back.”

The consumer electronics store can safely hold 1,100 people, and today Greene knows it will be so full at times the doors will temporarily shut. He watched the first customers arrive Wednesday night, camping on the sidewalk in tents for a 5 a.m. special opening Friday. They’re forgoing a warm Thanksgiving at home for the door-buster deals on plasma televisions, laptop computers and digital cameras.

“The wait wasn’t that bad,” said Dan Scarsorie of Everett, who waited six hours in freezing temperatures wrapped in a fleece blanket so he could buy a 42-inch plasma TV for $899. He estimated he saved $500.

By Friday, when Greene arrives at 2:30 a.m., a line of hundreds of shoppers swaddled in blankets, stocking caps and puffy jackets snaked from the fluorescent-lit front doors around the building. Most of the customers will never know that behind this one day is preparation — weeks of it. Dry runs. Extra training. Never-ending price checks.

Beginning in September, every employee received extra training for this one day, including practice runs in which they play customer, swamping the store. Employees watched a video of the previous year’s early-morning onslaught. For most new employees, the crush of customers still comes as a shocker.

“They have no idea what it’s going to be like at 5 o’clock in the morning on Friday,” said General Manager Andrea Chriscaden.

Greene knows exactly what it’s like and loves it. He described it as controlled chaos, and like a kid anticipating Christmas morning, he could hardly sleep the night before. He went to bed at 8:30 p.m. on Thanksgiving. His family, he said, understood.

“I love it when it’s busy,” he said. “There’s never a dull moment, there’s never a moment when you aren’t doing something. The day is going by at full speed.”

On a typical day, Greene makes sure the store looks its best and manages dozens of employees, prowling the floor, making sure customers are helped. On this day, his job looked more like that of an air traffic controller. Employees arrived puffy-eyed and clutching cups of coffee, and Greene pinballed around the store clocking them in, calling out directions, doling out warm words.

“Geordy!” rang out frequently. The workers came to him asking for fixes, let ins and let outs, questions and price checks. He kept smiling, sipping an energy drink and moving, keys swinging from his belt.

At 3 a.m., employees walk down the line and begin handing out tickets for the coveted sales items. The store tries to mete out the choicest items as fairly as possible. It mitigates disappointment and stampedes.

“It cuts back on the running and the pushing and the shoving,” said Chriscaden. “The customer knows ‘I can take my time and shop.’”

The company wants customers to leave happy. And customer happiness has a lot to do with how quickly they can find what they want and get out the door. Color-coded maps correspond with balloons in each department in the 30,000-square-foot store. Stock is strategically stacked. Employees run carts down the “racetrack,” the loop that runs around the perimeter of the store, to make sure no one gets wedged behind a Mount Rainier of computer printers.

“We want to make it quick and easy for customers,” Greene said. “If they’re anything like my mom, they’ve got the day planned out.”

And there’s the delicate dance of how to handle customers disappointed when that sale ad item is sold out. Inevitably, a few don’t realize others have camped out in tents for two days waiting for those same deals, Greene said, and the sales associates try to staunch the disappointment by suggesting other products.

Thirty minutes before the doors open, the staff gathers at the front of the store for a pep rally.

“These people are lined up outside for a reason,” hollered one of the staffers. “We’re here to help them get the things they want so they can have the best holiday ever.”

Outside, a few of the customers at the front of line peer through the glass doors as the workers scream out a cheer, whoop and whistle.

When the doors finally open, customers do behave civilly. Some pump their fists and holler as they speed-walk into the store, but that’s as raucous as it gets.

Chriscaden credits the order to the ticket-system and the planning. She typically hires 20 to 30 extra employees for the holiday season, and more than 100 staff members will play a carefully scripted part today. Cashiers scan and punch like mad, sales associates work the floor and line breakers keep the queue of customers moving.

Greene hunkers down near the televisions, directing buyers, handing out sales flyers, fixing a downed register and selling.

At 2 p.m. Greene estimates some 4,000 customers have come through the door. That’s more than three times the number of people who would come through on a typical Saturday, and the day is only half over. Traffic has been nonstop. That’s a change from years past, when a sudden rush of customers was followed by a lull.

“This day has flown by so fast,” he said. “This is exactly why I do this. To me the work is most fun when it’s busy and I’m constantly moving.”

Reporter Debra Smith: 425-339-3197 or dsmith@heraldnet.com.