NEW YORK — Thousands of marchers protesting the fatal police shooting of an unarmed black man crowded Fifth Avenue during one of the busiest shopping weekends of the year on Saturday, dampening retail sales.
The protest, led by Rev. Al Sharpton, was dubbed, “Shopping for Justice.” Sean Bell was shot and killed last month by New York City police on his wedding day. Prosecutors are investigating the shooting.
The demonstration, which began at noon on 59th Street and Fifth Avenue and ended at 34th Street and Seventh Avenue about an hour later, chased many shoppers away as they had difficulty working their way through the crowd of protesters.
“We track our numbers every hour and I see that it did disrupt business for about one and a half hours,” said Ed Bucciarelli, president and chief executive officer at Henri Bendel, who was at the store on Saturday. “It was, of course, a very important one and a half hours, but it certainly could have been much worse. It was very quiet in the store, but we were running ahead of plan all week, so we were lucky that it didn’t completely ruin our business.”
Just down the avenue at Saks Fifth Avenue, sales associates had mixed reviews about business.
“It was like New Years Eve in here it was so busy,” said one main floor saleswoman. “I would say we were quite busy.”
Another saleswoman on the main floor disagreed.
“It was really slow, which is strange for a Saturday, no matter what’s going on outside,” she said. “It’s also the holidays, so I would think that people would have no choice but to go shopping.”
At Brooks Brothers, a saleswoman said that the store was busy all day.
“We were not affected at all,” she said. “We were consistently selling.”
A sales associate at Bergdorf Goodman said that Sunday was a slower day than Saturday.
“It was very busy in here, believe it or not,” she said. “A lot of people are traveling next week so they have to get their shopping done now no matter what.”
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Marie Fischer, a shopper at Bergdorf visiting from her home in Switzerland, said she came to town to visit her daughter before Christmas, hoping to get things done over the weekend.
“On Saturday, I went downtown, even though I had originally planned to shop uptown,” she said Sunday. “There was no way I was shopping on Fifth with a protest going on. I saw it on the news and it looked like a mess.”
“It wasn’t busy at all while the protest was happening,” said a salesman at Takashimaya. “I went on my lunch break and it was impossible to get back across the street to the store, so I could understand why people wouldn’t want to be shopping. But it did pick up later in the day. We got pretty busy later in the afternoon.”
Meanwhile, on Sunday, another protest was happening in SoHo, in front of the Yellow Fat Bastard store at 478 Broadway.
About 100 people, all family members of retail workers on the Lower East Side, came out to fight for better working conditions, higher pay and benefits.
The organization claims that primarily young Latino, Asian, African and West Indian New Yorkers and immigrants, who participated in the rally, are being mistreated by their employers, which include stores like Yellow Rat Bastard, David Z and Uniqlo.