Black Friday Draws Giant Crowds to Braintree at Midnight

had its well-behaved jumble outside the main doors. Target its long, tidy line, treated to free Luna bars by a security guard, and the a flood of customers, eager for early-morning visits to , the and other post-midnight openers.

, though, took the doorbuster prize on Black Friday in Braintree, claiming the earliest person camped out for deals and the largest line of the night.

At the front end of a line that snaked along the edge of The Marketplace's parking lot and included many beach chairs and some portable bathrooms, sat Billy Lincoln, a high school freshman from Hingham.

Lincoln arrived at Best Buy on Tuesday afternoon with a thermal sleeping bag and a beach chair, ready to deal with the rain that first day, miss a half-day of school on Wednesday, and pass the time with homework and a lot of reading.

"The first day was terrible," he said. "Now I'm really warm."

Like many customers outside the Grossman Drive retailer late Thursday night and early Friday morning, Lincoln had his eye on a 42-inch flat-screen, HDTV for $199, a savings of at least $300 to $400. "That was pretty much the deal-breaker for me," he said.

Larry Levesque was, at one point, the last person in line at Best Buy, until dozens of more customers filled in behind him. Levesque, from Pembroke, said it was his first time out for Black Friday deals. This year his wife was at Walmart and Target, making it his duty to try and snag a marked-down 55-inch TV.

"If I don't get it here, I'll get it at Sears," he said.

When Best Buy eventually opened at 1 a.m., the crowd moved slowly forward, entering the store a few people at a time. A police officer in charge of crowd control said the last people in line likely would not make it inside until 4 a.m.

Across Braintree, just before 12:30 a.m., there was no first person in line at Macy's, nor a last. A crowd outside the main doors facing the north parking lot bunched up and waiting for the doors to open, while inside the Plaza a few dozen more were perched as well.

The Plaza doors opened just after midnight – not the mall's official 4 a.m. opening – but for employees and customers at stores like and Disney, which opened right after 12 a.m., and others, like , which featured lines of people anticipating 12:30 openings.

Several customers waiting outside of Target said they were disappointed that the out of concern over Massachusetts' blue laws. But Ricky Fichtner was happy enough, as a first-time Black Friday doorbuster able to snag the first spot in line at 5 p.m. on Thanksgiving. Fichtner, from Quincy, was hoping for a 46-inch LCD TV, on sale for $298 from $550.

Down at the end of the Target line, which stretched past the south entrance of Nordstroms as 1 a.m. neared, Andrew Donovan had moved from saving money at the Disney Store inside the Plaza to Target, and had an open mind on deals.

The early-morning portion of Black Friday in Braintree this year was, by all appearances, a significant uptick over 2010. Lines were longer and many more stores chose to open close to midnight. On Grossman Drive, retailers like and were among those taking advantage of customers increasingly eager for the best deals possible, regardless of time or a nightime chill.

Christina DiVito, though camped out with several friends in front of GameStop, found the experience unsettling. "It's too much," she said. "It's really depressing."

Depressing, perhaps, but also enough of a slice of Americana for DiVito, from Weymouth and a student at Bridgewater State, to use as a lesson for several foreign exchange students – mostly from Hong Kong – whom she has been teaching English. Later on Friday, DiVito said, she was planning to "let them loose" at the South Shore Plaza.