Could Retailary Crowds Be Temporarily Stopped During a Pandemic?

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Should Black Friday and Cyber Monday have special restrictions during an inevitable pandemic?

FOX’s Lisa Brady looks at it:

You could call it the holiday of commerce but this holiday of retail sales also brings with it a variety of unusual crowd sizes including an estimated 50 million people at an Apple Store a few days ago, but would it be possible to banish these retail shopping mega-crowds?

What about affecting this Friday’s sales even though we already know the holiday season is right around the corner? Or how about that day after Thanksgiving where hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets for a massive Black Friday sales event.

Should those big city sales moves be suspended, if at all?

This is what Robert Morris University marketing professor Meredith Frykman says:

(Frykman) “What they do, if any, the United States Centers for Disease Control does not actively regulate that. They are going to deal with the epidemics within their hospitals and I do not see them trying to create a government-owned supply chain for all of that merchandise. So that’s going to be a continued brick and mortar problem.”

So what do we do in the meantime?

(Frykman) “It depends on each city’s structure but essentially what we see in New York and those areas are they have a unique style of Christmas that is not inclusive to the nation as a whole. And so, they have their population center in a place of high income and therefore very high tolerance in terms of crowds.”

If the government is asking us to be more discerning when buying a Christmas present we’d be paying attention to this now.

I’m Lisa Brady, FOX News.

Follow Lisa Brady on Twitter: @LisaMBrady

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