Frenzied Shopping at Lake Success Before Blizzard

The huddled masses stood outside the apparel store New York & Company at the Lake Success Shopping Center at a few minutes before 11 a.m. Sunday, waiting for the doors to open so they could take advantage of the 50 percent post-Christmas discounts and get home before the big blizzard hit.

Normally, Dec. 26 is one of the busiest shopping days of the year, and on this day, the parking lots were filling up quickly around 11 a.m. The only difference was that the shoppers, like Jim Finnegan of New Hyde Park, were there for a purpose: to do their business and then get home. Finnegan was at Barnes & Noble to redeem a gift certificate. He said he checked weather.com and saw "a window of opportunity" to come out and shop.  "You won't see me here at 3 p.m.," he said.

Lines were 10-deep at several checkout counters at the Sears at Lake Success Shopping Center. This following a holiday season that "was crazy busy for clothes, especially children's clothes," said Jada, a sales rep. Sears was scheduled to be open from 7 a.m. to 9 p.m. on Sunday, and Jada, who commutes by bus, was wondering how she would get home if the forecast for blizzard conditions for the afternoon and evening stood up.

Workers throughout the shopping center, including Barnes & Noble, Verizon Wireless and New York & Company said they did not know if their stores would close early because of the snow. Sid, a sales associate at Verizon, was the lone employee in the store at 11:15 a.m. He said this Christmas season was not as good as last year's for Verizon although the store did 25 activations on Christmas Eve, which was a great day. They had done one activation in the first hour on Sunday.

The busiest store at the shopping center was Ace Hardware. A line of 25 customers snaked around the back aisle, with many buying snow shovels, ice melt, scrapers and windshield washer liquid in preparation for the snowstorm. Patrick Chan of New Hyde Park bought two shovels, one for him and one for his wife, he said, along with two, 10-pound bags of ice melt. Asked why he waited until now to but snow shovels, Chan gave a sheepish grin before saying, "I don't know. I bought a new one last year but it broke because of [all] the snow we had. The other day they weren't talking about a big snowstorm for today so I didn't see the urgency. I do now."

As of Saturday 2 p.m., stores contacted by New Hyde Park Patch said they were going to stay open until their normal closing times.