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Employees Only: Behind the scenes of Black Friday

Full of Thanksgiving turkey, homemade dressing and the second slice of irresistible pumpkin pie, family members gather around the dinner table to discuss the anticipated topic of the evening - the Black Friday game plan.

For savvy shoppers, Black Friday is all about saving dollars on doorbuster deals and checking items off their Christmas shopping list before coming out of their Thanksgiving food coma. Some extreme shoppers even pitch tents by Best Buy, shotgun Starbucks espresso shots and plank for minutes outside of Lululemon anxiously waiting for the doors to open.

On the other hand, retail employees are hustling and bustling behind the scenes in preparation for the Black Friday frenzy.

Many sales associates sacrifice their holidays to spend Thanksgiving evening stacking piles of sweaters, packing racks of pants and stocking registers with receipt paper, gift bags and clothes hangers.

While some large retailers such as Target and Amazon pay their employees time and a half, however, many do not. Walmart employees that work on Thanksgiving aren’t paid overtime, but they are given a meal.

For Walmart employees, the madness begins the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, Walmart’s biggest holiday of the year. While food is consistently stocked on shelves, PlayStations, Barbie Dream Plane and 50-inch, Roku Smart TVs are loaded on pallets in the back room, ready to roll out in less than 24 hours.

Like Walmart, many major retailers such as Target, Best Buy, Macy’s and Kohl’s kick off in-store Black Friday deals on Thanksgiving.

“On a typical day, we only have two registers and the self-checkout open,” Timmy Barnes, Walmart sales associate said. “But on Black Friday, we had workers at every register and there were still lines.”

Customers line up like a trail through the woods, anxiously waiting to snag their items when the clock strikes 6 p.m. Walmart employees, in their bright-colored vests, are given the signal to cut open the polymer plastic-wrapped pallets revealing piles of toys, electronics and the new iRobot Roomba 670 vacuum.

“Each year it seems like Black Friday starts earlier and earlier,” one shopper said, waiting almost two hours to snag a tv for her apartment, a gift to herself this Christmas.

At Anthropologie in the Bearden village shopping center, Alexis Cordisco, University of Tennessee student and all-night shopper is sipping her second grande, skinny vanilla latte and trying to conceal the bags under her eyes as she waits for the doors to open at 10 a.m.

“It’s so much fun to anticipate what’s going to be on sale this year,” Cordisco said, hoping to find scarves and sweaters on sale for the cold months ahead.

“Whatever I don’t get in-store, I’ll just get online,” Cordisco said.

According to data by Adobe Analytics, Black Friday shoppers spent $7.4 billion online, the second-largest internet shopping day ever trailing behind Cyber Monday’s spending at $7.9 billion.

On Thanksgiving day, online sales jumped 17% to $4.1 billion in the United States, according to data from Salesforce.

Behind two, towering wooden doors, Anthropologie employees are putting the finishing touches on the snack cart, setting up gift wrapping station and stocking registers with festive, pom-pom decorated gift cardholders.

With every fragrance label facing forward, candles stacked precisely on top of the other and scarves hanging color-coded from bright red to violet, it’s go-time. Lauren Call, Anthropologie operations manager swings open the doors and the sea of shoppers swarms in.

“It’s like customers have to touch everything,” Bailey Martin, a seasonal associate at Anthropologie said. Martin was the fitting room runner for the first half of her shift. “Women bring 20 items to the fitting rooms and decide they’ll keep one, if that,” Martin said. “And then I have to put everything back.”

Martin, like many other employees, darted around the store putting garments back in place, directing customers to the dressing room, grabbing sizes from the stock room and escorting anxious guests to the “employees only” restroom.

Every 15 minutes a sales associate was asking for a “customer restroom escort from cash wrap” over her employee headset.

A line for gift wrapping weaves between clothes racks and mannequins while another employee refills the apple cider pitcher on the snack cart for the fifth time in two hours.

“Women ask me one after another where the cookies on the snack cart came from,” Rose Kennedy, a seasonal sales associate said. “I think I told half Trader Joes and the other half Whole Foods,” Kennedy said. “Whoops.”

Many women seemed more interested in the raspberry jam-filled pastries than the pick-a-pom beanies and holiday tea towels.

Customers are checked out at the register and despite the chaos in the store, employees wish them well with a smile and “Merry Christmas”.

A few miles down Kingston Pike near West Town Mall, Jennifer Norris is clocking into her 5 p.m. shift at Ross Dress for Less. A hit-or-miss retail shop, Ross has daily bargains on big name brands. For the largest shopping day of the year, Ross is open from 8 a.m. to 11:30 p.m.

“We were insanely busy on Black Friday, and the customers weren’t very nice,” Norris said. “One of my co-workers got yelled at by a lady for not having the bathrooms unlocked, and my manager had to kick them out.”

Crowds are chaotic from the entrance to the fitting room, clothes are clumped in mini-mountains and shoes are scattered throughout the store. A needle in a haystack could be found quicker than the match to a size 7 sequin sneaker.

“Customers at Ross are pretty messy on a normal day, but after they left, the store looked like a tornado went through it,” Norris said.

While it may seem that stores close at a reasonable time, “Customers probably don’t know that we have to stay way after they leave on Black Friday,” Norris said. Out of three scheduled breaks, Norris only got one, which was cut short.

The music cuts off and the doors locked at 11:30 p.m. but the employees were just getting started. “We spent almost two hours cleaning up the disaster,” Norris said.

She didn’t clock out of her shift until 1 a.m.

Back at Anthropologie, employees sweep squished pom-poms off the ground and pick purses and pleated pants off the sales floor. Sweaters are scattered across the store, apple cider is sticky on the wooden floors, and the only thing that hasn’t changed is the scent of citrus and sugar notes blended in the burning candles.

The chaos calms and many shoppers return home to sleep off their shopping spree while retail employees are still at work, cleaning up the aftermath. In less than 24 hours, Walmart associates transformed the Black Friday extravaganza into the organized, 24-hour supermarket it is for the remaining 364 days a year.

During the busy holiday season, people are bustling to buy holiday party outfits and secret Santa surprises that they sometimes overlook the people who dedicate their time and energy to helping them pick out the perfect gift. “I wouldn’t have this job if I didn’t love seeing the smile on people’s faces when they find the perfect outfit,” Kennedy said as she hung up clothes left on the dressing room floor.