WHITNEY ROYSTER Star-Tribune staff writer | Posted: Monday, November 27, 2006 12:00 am
JACKSON - Mary and Sammy Aboud came to Jackson Hole for Thanksgiving - and the requisite post-Thanksgiving Day shopping - specifically to shop for unique gifts.
"We just picked Jackson for the holidays," Mary Aboud said. Husband Sammy said in his Florida town the shopping is at big chains such as Macy's and Dillard's.
"The only thing we recognize here is McDonald's and Albertsons," he said. "We could spend literally a week walking from shop to shop here. For me it's wonderful, because you don't see the same kind of stores anywhere else - and you don't get this kind of friendliness anywhere else."
The Abouds were buying a pink ski jacket with fur-lined hood for their bichon frise, Koko. This is Koko's second ski jacket; her current one doesn't have a hood.
"We're going to do most of our shopping here," Sammy Aboud said, and the couple's hotel will ship the items back home for them.
Black Friday - so named because it is the day when many businesses move from the red into the black because of a rush of shopping - was perhaps not as bustling in Jackson because of the lack of blockbuster shops with their blockbuster deals.
One exception is Staples, new to the Jackson area, which offered "doorbuster" deals starting at 6 a.m. Larry Lennon, store manager, said there were 30 or 40 people waiting outside for the doors to open to get their hands on a new hard drive or computer.
He acknowledged bigger cities would have more people and a bigger volume.
A local home decorating store, Earth and Vine, offered early-bird specials, with high discounts in the early hours, decreasing as the day wore on.
Carol Rodriguez said the sales help give people an incentive "to make major buying decisions early and fast." People were also waiting outside for her shop to open at 8 a.m.
The day was already a big business day, Rodriguez said, and "it will have broken all the sales records by the end of the day."
Steve Spare and Betsy Joyner were in town from North Carolina, and guessed they would do about half of their holiday shopping at the one-of-a-kind stores in Jackson.
Teresa Sanders of Fort Worth, Texas, said shopping in Jackson is fun if you're looking for something specific and different, but said the town needed more than "trinket" stores.
Still, there were some browsing who were not interested in buying.
"We don't have the money to shop here," Jake Veigel of Star Valley said. "But we like to look."
Reporter Whitney Royster can be reached at (307) 734-0260 or at royster@tribcsp.com.