Black Friday Entices Shoppers with Sales and Entertainment

Black Friday at the is no longer just a shopping event. The biggest shopping day of the year has become a social outing as well as a night for great deals.  

Although most stores didn’t open until midnight, the mall opened its doors early to let people line up for their favorite stores. The radio station, 94.5 WPST, was at the mall giving out gift bags of goodies to the first 300 people that lined up. The PST crew hung out at the mall until 2:00 a.m. giving away prizes, entering people to win mall gift cards and taking pictures with their mascot. 

While many people at the mall were all about the savings, there were plenty of people walking through the mall enjoying the scenery and the entertainment the mall provided. The Rock N’ Roll Chorus performed during the first few hours of the night. The group has no instruments and uses only their voices to perform songs from Bruce Springsteen, the Beatles and Andy Grammer. 

With all the extra entertainment some people at the mall were only there to see what the Black Friday hype was all about. Gail Chadwick of Jackson came to the mall with her family but had no intention of shopping. 

“No Black Friday shopping for me.” said Chadwick. “I’m just wandering around trying to see what I’m going to do.” 

Senior Marketing Manager of the Freehold Raceway Mall, Debra Panzarella, said that it took months of planning to organize the events for Black Friday at the Freehold Raceway Mall. 

“Black Friday is one of those nights that just has a buzz about it; there’s nothing quite like it.” said Panzarella who has been working Black Friday at the mall for the last 16 years. “The stores really planned well with promoting their door busters and special sales.” 

and took a different route to promoting their stores by having shirtless male models mingle with shoppers and take pictures with guests who were waiting to get inside of the store to shop. 

The longest lines at the mall during the early hours of Black Friday were at Victoria Secret, Footlocker and . At Victoria Secret, shoppers received a tote bag with a $65 purchase, saved on PINK apparel, reduced sleepwear and beauty sets and gave away reward cards. At Footlocker, shoppers had the opportunity to purchase sneakers at large discounted prices and at Gamestop shoppers received major discounts on videogame systems.

Although it is not technically a store at the Freehold Raceway Mall, another consistently long line at Black Friday was for