Thousands of people in the Eastern Cape flocked to shopping malls yesterday to take advantage of Black Friday specials, in which prices were slashed up to 80%.
Scores of customers in the province and country rushed to malls from as early as 5.30am.
In East London, shops were congested as traffic backed up on roads leading to popular centres such as Hemingways, Vincent and Nahoon.
At the Checkers store in Nahoon, anxious shoppers pushed their way through the crowds in a bid to get stock.
No one was injured.
Francis Benett said said she rushed to Checkers at 5.30am and was 15th in the queue.
“I thought we were early but obviously other people had the same thing in mind and the queue was very long.
“Inside the store it was so packed we could hardly move smoothly, but I’m happy I managed to get everything I wanted,” she said.
Another bargain hunter, Cebisa Khondlo, said it was terrible trying to find parking.
“We had to park along the Old Transkei Road and walk a about 50m to the shop. The shop was so congested I even started to feel irritable at some point, but I told myself I can’t miss out on the bargains.
“The plan was for me to buy Christmas groceries, but I also found myself buying toys for my nieces and nephews because they were ridiculously cheap,” Khondlo said.
Mdantsane City Mall marketing manager Wendy Zitha said shoppers had been well behaved.
“It helped that the stores opened hours earlier and the mall has been buzzing all day. It started to settle down after 11am but we’re expecting it to pick up as more people come in at lunch and after work,” she said in the morning.
On top of the crazy specials, the popular NU6 Mdantsane mall also gave away R10000 worth of gift vouchers to some lucky customers.
“The centre management dispersed throughout the stores of the mall to identify random shoppers who were the recipients of vouchers equivalent to how much they had spent or the value of what they had in their trollies,” Zitha said.
For those who opted to shop online instead, it also proved frustrating, as several websites crashed due to the heavy traffic.
Speaking on behalf of Sapt, a website load balancer, Brian Sibanda said: “Most businesses spend millions on marketing and growing their revenue but very little attention is paid to making sure their IT infrastructure can handle high volumes of traffic to their websites ...
“This morning, we saw the first victim – Takealot – whose website has crashed due to the high traffic volumes,” he said. — mbalit@dispatch.co.za