Let the Black Friday Shopping Begin!

The longest and possibly most contentious Black Friday is in store for shoppers.

Target, Best Buy, Macy's and Kohl's stores will open at midnight, their earliest openings. Company executives said they are opening earlier because customers wanted to have the option of beginning their searches for short-lived bargains relatively soon after eating their Thanksgiving meals instead having to wake up early Friday and competition.

• Click here for Black Friday ads.

Target's requirement for employees working when the stores open at midnight to report at 11 p.m. on Thanksgiving prompted Anthony Hardwick, a Target employee in Omaha, Neb., to post a petition on the website Change.org to request that the company return to its previous 5 a.m. Black Friday opening time so employees would be able to have Thanksgiving dinners with their families "and get a good night's rest on Thanksgiving."

More than 190,000 signatures were presented to Target's Minneapolis corporate headquarters on Monday, but the midnight openings were not dropped.

Meanwhile, Adbusters, the Vancouver, British Columbia-based foundation which conceived the Occupy Wall Street protest, is making Black Friday the start of its "Occupy Xmas" campaign, seeking "to put the brakes on rapid consumerism for 24 hours."

Adbusters is calling for "flash mobs, consumer fasts and mall sit-ins" in an attempt to "launch an all-out offensive to unset the corporate kings on the holiday throne."

Black Friday also is Adbusters 20th annual Buy Nothing Day.

However, the anti-Black Friday efforts are predicted to have little impact.

Black Friday is forecast to be the year's biggest shopping day for the eighth consecutive year, according to ShopperTrak, the largest traffic measuring company.

A survey found that more people plan to shop on Black Friday than either of the past two years. According to the poll conducted for the International Council of Shopping Centers, a shopping center trade association, and the investment banking firm Goldman Sachs, 34 percent of consumers questioned said they planned to shop on Black Friday, compared to 31 percent in 2010 and 26 percent in 2009.

"In addition to buying gifts, consumers overwhelmingly indicated that they would be looking for bargains on Black Friday for themselves as well," said Michael P. Niemira, the council's chief economist and director of research.

The day after Thanksgiving has become known as Black Friday as it begins the Christmas shopping season where retailers achieve a profit for the year after operating at a break-even point or loss. It is also a reference to the accounting practice of using black ink, or being "in the black" to denote profits.

It is a day known for customers lining up outside stores and shopping centers in the cold -- even camping for several days -- awaiting earlier-than- usual opening times to take advantage of sale prices, some in effect for just a few hours.

When the stores open, the hot toy choices will be:

• Mattel's Angry Birds Knock On Wood game;
• Hasbro's Beyblade: Metal Fusion battling tops;
• Fisher-Price's Big Action Construction Site;
• Cepia's DaGeDar supercharged ball bearings;
• i-Star Entertainment's FryFlyz yo-yo-like toy;
• Mattel's Hot Wheels Wall Tracks;
• VTech's Inno Tab tablet;
• MGA Entertainment's Lalaloopsy Silly Hair Jewel Sparkles doll;
• Thinkway Toys' Lazer Stunt Chaser Dragon Fire stunt vehicle;
• Lego's Alien Conquest and Ninjago;
• WowWee's Lite Sprites;
• Spin Master's The Logo Board Game;
• Mattel's Monster High Dead Tired dolls;
• Hasbro's Nerf Vortex;
• Spinmaster's Redakai collectible trading card game;
• Jakks Pacific's Spy Net Stealth Video Glasses;
• and Mega Brands' 3-D Classic Mickey Mouse puzzle,

according to the toy review website timetoplaymag.com.

Popular electronic items according to Yahoo! include:

• the iPhone 4S; EVO 3D Smart Phone;
• Canon EOS Rebel T3i Black SLR Digital Camera Kit;
• Nikon Coolpix L120 Black Digital Camera;
• the fourth generation iPod Touch;
• Sony Bravia LED television;
• PlayStation 3 Slim Black 160GB Console;
• the Battlefield 3 -- Limited Edition video game for the PlayStation 3;
• and a 16 gigabyte iPad 2.

The leading trends in apparel and accessories for women include big bulky sweaters; Nordic/artic pattered sweaters, knits and dresses; handbags with a status label, apparel that can be worn right away; oversized earrings; and animal prints, especially zebra and leopard accents, according to The Doneger Group, which bills itself as the fashion industry's leading source of global trend intelligence.

-- City News Service