By Mustafa Caglayan
NEW YORK
U.S. stores opened on Black Friday with millions of shoppers hoping to carve up discount deals on the busiest shopping day of the year.
The day after the Thanksgiving Day holiday is called Black Friday, marking the beginning of the U.S. Christmas shopping season and when most major retailers traditionally offer huge discounts.
The black in Black Friday refers to bringing retailers out of any red territory, symbolizing losses, into black territory, representing profits.
Some retail chains opened their doors as early as Thursday in a bid to prevent deaths and injuries caused by crowd surges experienced in previous years.
Several hundreds shoppers were in line when a Best Buy electronics store on New York City’s Fifth Ave. opened at 5 p.m. Thursday.
Toys R Us and J.C. Penney clothing store also opened at 5 p.m, one hour before Macy's, Target and Kohl's opened their doors.
But as cost conscious shoppers left that turkey dinners in search of bargains, activists across the country called for a shopping boycott to protest a grand jury's decision not to prosecute a white police officer in the shooting of a black teen in Ferguson, Missouri.
The boycott call, spearheaded by protest groups Blackout for Human Rights and Justice for Michael Brown Leadership Coalition, is spreading via social media with tweets using the hashtags #BoycottBlackFriday, #BrownFriday, #NotOneDime and #HandsUpDontSpend, referring to the "Hands up don't shoot" slogan repeated at many Ferguson protests in the wake of Michael Borwn's death at the hands of Darren Wilson.
Some protesters are asking shoppers to instead buy at black-owned establishments.
In recent years, traditional stores have lost saless to online retailers. More than 140 million unique shoppers are expected to spend Thursday through Sunday, according to a survey conducted by the National Retail Federation.
In 2013, online spending on Black Friday reached $1.2 billion.
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