Dark clouds over Central America Black Friday

Posters with offers of up to 70% on selected merchandise, in Central America’s shopping centers but few shoppers are taking the Black Friday bait.

In Albrook Mall, the largest shopping center in Panama, there were people walking, but in stores, there were few buyers, a very different image from other years, in which shoppers arrived in massive numbers waiting for the shops to open.

Panama is experiencing an acute economic crisis from the covid pandemic, with unemployment currently hovering around 14.5% after having reached 18.5% in 2020.

Panama is a shopping destination for many residents of Central and South American countries and for five years in October it has been celebrating the “Panama Black Week”.

In Costa Rica, the day passed without a major influx of people to the shops, but most of the stores implement a “black weekend” and even a ” black November “with promotions that go beyond a single day.

The pandemic has also forced stores to adapt and make online sales one of their strengths. Traders have said they expect sales to exceed 2020, but not previous years.

In Nicaragua, only the large chains exhibited offers in shopping centers, where there were people walking and buyers with the odd bag, while in popular markets the attendance was normal.

In El Salvador,  and Guatemala Efe found a good influx of people walking through the corridors of shopping centers but not in stores.

In Honduras, Black Friday,   was a precursor to Sunday’s election and sales have been “low,” as the salesperson of an electrical appliance store told Efe, but In Tegucigalpa, some supermarkets register had long lines as customers stocked up on food, due in part, to the electoral uncertainty. “It is better to be prepared, we do not know what will happen after Sunday’s elections,” said Carmen Salinas, who made a long line to enter a supermarket south of the Honduran capital, told Efe.

In Sunday’s elections, more than 5 million Hondurans go to the polls to elect the successor to Juan Orlando Hernández, who was re-elected in the 2017 elections, in which the opposition alleges that there was “fraud.”