By Jaewon Kang, Bloomberg News

This Black Friday, one class of retailers has figured out the trick of luring shoppers suffering through frigid temperatures and high inflation: teen brands.

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To tempt picky Americans, they are offering sales on products like perfume, body wash and sweatshirts. It’s seemingly paying off: The most crowded stores Friday in cities across the U.S. belonged to brands including Edikted, Kendra Scott, and Bath & Body Works.

Other mall retailers saw thin crowds and disappointed shoppers, who were expecting bigger discounts at higher-end brands like Ralph Lauren and Coach.

Kathy McFarland was at a packed New York City Edikted store that was having a 30% off sale. McFarland, a retired teacher visiting the city from Missouri, had never heard of the brand, but her grandkids wanted to go. In Florida, Jenna Guttman took her daughter to Edikted for her 13th birthday because they don’t have a location back home in Chicago, the 49-year-old said.

Brands popular with younger shoppers and on TikTok — even if the discounts aren’t that eye-popping — seem to be hitting with shoppers this Black Friday. Alo Yoga, Brandy Melville and Kendra Scott, also brands that appeal to younger shoppers, were bustling in various places.

Sisters Zoe, 13, and Berkley Slick, 16, were waiting to get into Kendra Scott in the Jordan Creek Town Center mall in West Des Moines, Iowa, for their first Black Friday shopping experience. “It’s very overstimulating,” Zoe said, looking around at the packed mall.

Dheeraj Nimmala, a 21-year-old manager at Perfume Obsessions says the day has been “hectic.” The store, whose Jean Paul Gaultier Elixir is popular on TikTok, is running a buy-one-get-one-free offer all day.

Stores with standout deals also seem to be drawing the biggest crowds. A Bath & Body Works in Newport News, Virginia, that’s offering a buy three, get four free deal was packed. People had to turn sideways to make their way through crowds. Vizio TVs and Oura Rings with more than 30% off are among popular items on Friday, according to Cedric Clark, executive vice president of store operations at Walmart Inc.’s U.S. division.

“Customers are maximizing their deals,” he said in an interview from a new Walmart store in Cypress, Texas.

Target said lines formed as early as 3 a.m. at some stores with 150 shoppers, on average, waiting at opening time for free giveaways. It most popular offerings were toys for 50% off and 40% off trees and holiday décor.

Otherwise, many shoppers were underwhelmed and unimpressed by most Black Friday promotions.

The Repasky family makes a tradition of coming out to Tysons Corner Center shopping mall in Virginia on Black Friday. One change they noticed this year: fewer doorbuster deals and freebies.

Jennifer Schmuck reported the same from Westfield Montgomery Mall in Maryland Friday morning. “I don’t think the deals were as good,” the 50-year-old banker said. Last year Macy’s Inc. gave her a $10 coupon for being among the first in line, but didn’t this year.

Near Philadelphia, Melissa Ritzius, a 50-year-old homemaker, was similarly unimpressed with the sales at the Polo Ralph Lauren Factory Store. Even though the deals looked comparable to last year, with higher listed price they didn’t amount to much of a discount.

Many shoppers said they came out for the experience of big crowds, yet that too was disappointing for some. Some malls and shopping centers across the U.S., like Patrick Henry Mall in Virginia, were empty this morning. Others had lines at a few stores, like Macy’s, Old Navy, Target and Edikted.

“It feels like less than a normal Saturday,” said Nicole Slaughter at the Mall of Georgia in the Atlanta area.

Deontay Phillips, a 26-year-old who serves in the military, was underwhelmed by the lack of deals and festivities. “It’s not really what I expected,” said Phillips at a Best Buy Co. store in Newport News, Virginia. “I probably won’t do this again.”

U.S. consumers are heading into the official start of the holiday shopping season Friday with a host of economic concerns, including a cooling job market, stagnant wages, persistent inflation and the looming fallout from tariffs. Black Friday will be a litmus test: Will American shoppers push through growing economic headwinds or will the consumer-powered U.S. economy start to fizzle?

Signs point to a less indulgent holiday season.

“We are not expecting it to be an overzealous, exciting holiday,” said Marshal Cohen, chief retail adviser at research firm Circana.

While overall spending is estimated to be on par with last year, according to Circana, unit sales could fall as much as 2.5%. In other words: People will spend more to buy less stuff.

“The tree is not going to be jammed this year,” Cohen said.

U.S. retailers generate 20% of their annual sales in November and December. This year, companies are competing for an increasingly price-sensitive and anxious consumer. While people are still willing to spend — particularly those in the top 10% of earners — they’re being picky about where they put their dollars. Some shoppers say they’re planning on taking advantage of Black Friday sales not to splurge, but to stock up on essentials.

Tariffs, meanwhile, are making it harder for some brands to offer the big discounts usually associated with Black Friday. And shoppers who venture to stores may encounter longer lines and less help. Seasonal retail hiring is expected to fall to its lowest level since 2009.

“Nothing is discounted enough that it moves the needle where I’m like, ‘oh I don’t need it, but I need to get it now,’” said Jennifer Greenberg, a 29-year-old who lives in New York City, while shopping for a menorah at Bloomingdale’s.

(With assistance from Uma Bhat, Madison Muller, Lily Meier, Michelle Fay Cortez, Dina Katgara, Max Rivera, Kristina Peterson, Jeannette Neumann and Redd Brown.)

©2025 Bloomberg L.P. Visit bloomberg.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

By JILL LAWLESS

LONDON (AP) — A rare crystal and diamond Fabergé egg crafted for Russia’s ruling family before it was toppled by revolution is going up for auction, valued at more than 20 million pounds ($26.4 million).

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Christie’s auction house says the Winter Egg is just one of seven of the opulent ovoids remaining in private hands. It will be offered for sale at Christie’s London headquarters on Tuesday.

The 4-inch tall egg is made from finely carved rock crystal, covered in a delicate snowflake motif wrought in platinum and 4,500 tiny diamonds. It opens to reveal a removable tiny basket of bejewelled quartz flowers symbolizing spring.

Margo Oganesian, the head of Christie’s Russian art department, likened it to a luxurious Kinder Surprise chocolate.

The Winter Egg is a superb example of craft and design, “the ‘Mona Lisa’ for decorative arts,” Oganesian said.

One of just two created by female designer Alma Pihl, the egg was commissioned by Czar Nicholas II for his mother Dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna as an Easter present in 1913. Pihl’s other egg is owned by Britain’s royal family.

Craftsman Peter Carl Fabergé and his company created more than 50 of the eggs for Russia’s imperial family between 1885 and 1917, each elaborately unique and containing a hidden surprise. Czar Alexander III started the tradition by presenting an egg to his wife each Easter. His successor, Nicholas II, extended the gift to his wife and mother.

The Romanov royal family ruled Russia for 300 years before it was ousted by the 1917 revolution. Nicholas and his family were executed in 1918.

Bought by a London dealer for 450 pounds when the cash-strapped Communist authorities sold off some of Russia’s artistic treasures in the 1920s, the egg changed hands several times. It was believed lost for two decades until it was auctioned by Christie’s in 1994 for more than 7 million Swiss francs ($5.6 million at the time). It sold again in 2002 for $9.6 million.

Now it is expected to surpass the record $18.5 million paid at a 2007 Christie’s auction for another Fabergé egg created for the Rothschild banking family.

There are 43 surviving imperial Fabergé eggs, most in museums.

As far as Black Friday deals go, ticket buyers to Friday’s midday showdown between the NHL’s two hottest teams certainly got their money’s worth.

It may be too early to talk about playoff previews when fans of the Wild and Avalanche are still munching on cold turkey and leftover sweet potatoes, but Minnesota’s 3-2 shootout win over Colorado had all of the markings of a showdown between two teams with designs on meeting again in May.

Mats Zuccarello and Matt Boldy scored in the post-overtime shootout as Minnesota asserted its dramatic and thorough re-entry into the Central Division title race after a sluggish first month of the season.

Kirill Kaprizov had a pair of late second period goals as the Wild rallied from a mid-game deficit, improving to 11-1-1 in November. Colorado has now gone 15 games without a regulation loss.

Jesper Wallstedt’s case for NHL rookie of the year got just a tiny bit stronger, as he made 39 saves and improved to 7-0-2 with the win. He stopped Nathan MacKinnon and Cale Makar in the shootout

Both teams had early power plays and both goalies were tested before the first media break. In a game where mistakes were rare, the Avalanche jumped on a miscue to take the early lead. Tied up along the boards in the defensive zone, Kaprizov’s no-look pass missed two Wild teammates and went right to the stick of Colorado star Nathan MacKinnon who was alone at the top of the crease. His quick shot resulted in an NHL-best 19th goal of the season.

But Kaprizov atoned for any perceived error just a bit past the midway point of the game. His 200th career goal came with hulking Avalanche defenseman Brent Burns draped all over him, but still unable to stop a Zeev Buium pass from deflecting off Kaprizov and past Wedgewood for the equalizer.

With the goal, Kaprizov passed Zach Parise for third all-time on the Minnesota franchise scoring list. It also snapped a streak of more than 212 minutes Colorado had gone without allowing a goal.

But the Wild star was far from done, and gave Minnesota the lead before the second period was done. Ryan Hartman, who had missed the previous four games with a lower body injury, made an emphatic return when he circled the Colorado net, then fed Kaprizov for a rising shot that beat a sprawling Avalanche goalie Scott Wedgewood.

Gabriel Landeskog scored his third goal of the season in the latter half of the third to tie the game at 2-2.

Wedgewood finished with 35 saves for Colorado, which suffered its only regulation loss of the season on Oct. 25 in Boston. The Avalanche will be back in Minnesota in three weeks for a Dec. 21 rematch versus the Wild.

The Wild complete their holiday weekend back-to-back on Saturday evening with the Buffalo Sabres lone visit to St. Paul this season.

Briefly

Friday’s contest was the 400th career game for Wild forward Yakov Trenin, who assisted on Kaprizov’s second goal. He entered the NHL in 2019 and has spent time with Nashville, Colorado and the Wild since then. Trenin entered Friday’s game leading the NHL in hits with 108 this season.

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A significant new court filing claims Facebook and Instagram owner Meta had a “17x” policy allowing sex traffickers to post content related to sexual solicitation or prostitution 16 times before their accounts were suspended on the 17th “strike.” The allegation is one of many in the filing claiming Meta chose profit and user engagement over the safety and well-being of children.

The description of the purported sexual content policy at Instagram is contained in a new court filing by plaintiffs in an ongoing lawsuit against Meta, Google’s YouTube, Snapchat owner Snap and TikTok brought by children and parents, school districts and states — including California. They accuse the companies of intentionally addicting children to products they knew were harming them.

The filing makes the same general allegations against the four companies — that they targeted children and schools, and misrepresented their social media products — along with company-specific claims.

“Despite earning billions of dollars in annual revenue — and its leader being one of the richest people in the world — Meta simply refused to invest resources in keeping kids safe,” claimed the Friday filing in Oakland’s U.S. District Court. The lawsuit also targets products it deems harmful from Facebook, YouTube, Snapchat and TikTok. The plaintiffs seek unspecified damages, and a court order requiring the companies stop alleged “harmful conduct” and warn minor users and parents that their products are addictive and dangerous.

The new filing also claims Meta’s “outright lies” about its products’ harms prevented “even the most vigilant administrators, teachers, parents, and students from understanding and heading off the dangers inherent to Instagram and Facebook.”

A Meta spokesperson denied the accusations: “We strongly disagree with these allegations, which rely on cherry-picked quotes and misinformed opinions in an attempt to present a deliberately misleading picture.” For more than a decade, Meta has “listened to parents, researched issues that matter most, and made real changes to protect teens – like introducing Teen Accounts with built-in protections and providing parents with controls to manage their teens’ experiences,” the spokesperson said.

Snap criticized the allegations for misrepresenting its platform, which unlike other social media has no public likes or comparison metrics. “We’ve built safeguards, launched safety tutorials, partnered with experts, and continue to invest in features and tools that support the safety, privacy, and well-being of all Snapchatters,” a Snap spokesperson said in an emailed statement Tuesday.

Google and TikTok did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The plaintiffs cited what they described as internal company communications and research reports, and sworn depositions by current and former employees. The records are largely sealed by the court and could not be verified by this news organization.

The new filing claimed an account-recommendation feature on Instagram in 2023 recommended nearly 2 million minors to adults seeking to sexually groom children. More than 1 million potentially inappropriate adults were recommended to teen users in a single day in 2022, an internal audit found, according to the filing.

Facebook’s recommendation feature, according to a Meta employee, “was responsible for 80% of violating adult/minor connections,” the filing said.

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In March 2020, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told reporters his Menlo Park company was “actually surging the number of people” working on sensitive content including “child exploitation,” but internal communications cited in the court filing indicated that was not true, and the company had only about 30% of the staff it needed to review child-exploitation imagery.

Instagram as of March 2020 had no way for people to report the presence of child sexual abuse material, the filing said. When Vaishnavi Jayakumar, head of safety at Instagram from 2020 to 2023, first started at the company, she was told a reporting process would be too much work to build, and even more work to review reports, the filing said.

Even when Meta’s artificial intelligence tools identified child pornography and child sexualization material with 100% confidence, the company did not automatically delete it, the filing claimed. The company, which made $62.4 billion in profit last year, declined to tighten enforcement for fear of “false positives,” but could have solved the problem by hiring more staff, the filing said.

Jayakumar testified in a deposition that when any proposed changes that might reduce user engagement went up to Zuckerberg for review, the result would be a decision to “prioritize the existing system of engagement over other safety considerations,” the filing said.

Instead of simply making kids’ accounts private by default to protect them from adult predators, Meta “dragged its feet for years before making the change — allowing literally billions of unwanted adult-minor interactions to happen,” the filing claimed. Key to the delay, the filing alleged, was the internal projection that the change would cut daily users by 2.2%.

The company didn’t apply default privacy to all teens’ accounts until the end of last year, the filing said.

The lawsuit — still in an evidence-gathering discovery phase — also takes aim at Meta’s approach to children’s mental health and the purported damaging fallout for schools, where social media, the filing claims, has created “a compromised educational environment” and forced school districts to spend money and resources “to address student distraction and mental health problems.”

Internally, Meta researchers said of Instagram, “We’re basically pushers,” and “Teens are hooked despite how it makes them feel,” the filing said.

Meta “allowed its products to infiltrate classrooms, disrupt learning environments, and contribute directly to the youth mental health crisis now overwhelming schools nationwide,” claimed the filing, which accused Zuckerberg and Meta of lying to Congress.

Zuckerberg testified three times to Congress that he didn’t give his teams goals to increase time users spent on Meta’s platforms. But several internal messages referred to goals for teens’ time spent, and Zuckerberg himself said of growth metrics, “The most concerning of these to me is time spent,” the filing said.

When Meta in a late 2019 internal study called “Project Mercury” found that people who stopped using Facebook for a week reported feeling less depressed, anxious, lonely and judged socially, the company killed the project, the filing alleged. But in a U.S. Senate hearing, a company representative (who was not identified in the filing) was asked if Facebook could tell if increased use of its platform by teen girls was connected to increased signs of anxiety, and responded, “No,” the filing claimed.

Meta said publicly that a maximum of half a percent of users were exposed to suicide and self-harm material, but its own study found the number was around 7%, the filing said.

Brian Boland, who rose over 11 years to a vice-president position in Meta and left in 2020, testified in a deposition, “My feeling then and my feeling now is that they don’t meaningfully care about user safety.”

When a Meta employee criticized the company’s move, intended to protect children’s mental health, to hide “likes” on posts but only for users who opted-in, a member of Meta’s “growth team” responded. “It’s a social comparison app,” the member said, “[expletive] get used to it,” the filing said.