Black Friday beckoned and the people came. This year’s shopping day was just as busy as ever. Whether waiting in chairs and bundled up in layers of blankets, camping out in a tent, or simply braving the night’s cold standing in a coat and jeans, people turned out for the traditional consumer holiday en masse. Cards, conversations and catnaps all served to whittle away the time until the doors of the stores would open.

Bellevue’s Best Buy store, located along 120th Avenue near downtown Bellevue, saw a huge line. The first people had already begun lining up by 7 a.m. on Thanksgiving Day to wait for the Black Friday sale. Fellipe, one of the people near the head of the line, had been there since 9 a.m. For him, Black Friday shopping was “really fun” and worth missing Thanksgiving dinner for.

By 11 p.m., the line covered two sides of the store. An ill-timed electrical outage left the parking lot and store in a surreal twilight, lit up only by the lights of several nearby office buildings and the nearby Home Depot store. All in line were waiting for tickets that Best Buy would be handing out come 3 a.m., two hours before the store itself would open.

Each of the tickets allowed the holder to purchase the item that this ticket was for. Each customer could only hold one ticket for each item, but could hold multiple tickets if he or she planned to buy multiple items.

The Fry’s store in Renton had a long line as well. The only Fry’s retail store in the state, the electronics store saw its line extend around the corner of the store as well. Here, too, was the gaggle of chairs and tents that seemed to throng the walls of all stores during this post-holiday tradition. The feelings here were similar to those at the Best Buy store.

The Bellevue Sears store had much fewer people. By midnight only four people had shown up to wait outside the Sears’ doors. Yet these people knew exactly what they wanted and the deals that Sears would be offering. One had seen the same deal at Best Buy, but took advantage of Sears’ shorter line.

The word of the day was “laptops.” Regardless of whether they had decided on a specific make or model, or were simply shopping around, an overwhelming majority of the shoppers at Best Buy and Fry’s came to buy laptops. Netbooks were especially popular, owing to their already cheap price tag, which was only lowered even further during Black Friday. The other items that seemed to pop up frequently were desktop computers and TVs.

Yet even more important than Black Friday sales was the Black Friday spirit.

“It’s really fun,” said one shopper.

Some people hadn’t come to buy anything at all.

“I just wanted to get away from Thanksgiving dinner,” said another.

A group of college students who had stocked up on soda and snacks and had brought along a tent had come to Fry’s simply to “hang out.”

For many Black Friday had become an annual rite and, as such, it came with its own unwritten rules. A man in a passing car yelled out to Fellipe, “I will pay you $150 to buy something for me.” Fellipe refused. “If a guy doesn’t wait in line, I’m not going to buy it for him.”

For others, this Black Friday experience was the first. One girl waiting in line at Fry’s had sold all of her childhood toys for money to buy a new netbook.

Of course the sentiment that Black Friday was a matter of spirit rather than prices was not universally shared.

“Why else would you come [if not for the deals],” one potential shopper said, when she overheard a remark from another.

Yet the vast majority of people seemed to come at least partially for the fun of coming and socializing with like-minded shoppers and escaping from Thanksgiving mayhem.

Fry’s actually had another sale the day after Black Friday, its “One-Day Holiday Sale,” a post-Black Friday sale after the initial frenzy was supposed to have worn off. A whole new batch of sales were available for anyone who had missed what they had wanted on Black Friday. Unfortunately, for the hottest deals of that sale, all the customers except those who had made it there first thing in the morning heard the same old refrain. “Sorry, we’re all sold out.”

Changlin Li is a student at Interlake High School and an intern with the Bellevue Reporter. He can be reached at 425-453-4270, ext. 5060.