Retailers are pushing Black Friday store openings earlier than ever this year, with many companies starting their sales the minute Thanksgiving ends – or even earlier, while the turkey leftovers are still cooling.
Thanksgiving weekend has long been tied to shopping, with blockbuster pre-dawn sales luring shoppers on Black Friday. But this year, some shoppers and workers are saying retailers have gone too far, with openings set for midnight, 10 p.m., or 9 p.m.
Still, surveys and retail consultants are expecting shoppers to once again turn out in droves.
Charlotte-based Belk will open its department stores at 3 a.m., an hour earlier than last year. For the first time, Target, Macy’s, Best Buy and Kohl’s said they would open all of their stores at midnight.
Wal-Mart, whose Supercenters already stay open around the clock, followed by saying it would start its Black Friday sale at 10 p.m. on Thanksgiving, instead of in the early morning hours Friday, as it did last year. And Toys R Us will open to customers at 9 p.m. on Thanksgiving.
“I call it the graying of Black Friday,” said Marshall Cohen, chief analyst for retail consultant firm NPD Group. “Soon, it’s going to be Black Friday Month.”
In Charlotte, some shoppers said they feel retailers have finally pushed too far.
“They’re destroying Thanksgiving,” said Fran DiPietro. The grandmother of 10 has shopped on Black Friday, enduring the early hours to get presents for the grandchildren. But starting at midnight – or even earlier – is just too much for her.
“Pretty soon there won’t even be a Thanksgiving, it will just be Black Thursday,” DiPietro said. She also sympathizes with workers who will be getting up from their turkey dinners and heading straight to the cash registers. “They’re losing their Thanksgiving,” she said.
Retailers are searching for any edge during an economic recovery that’s been slower than forecasters predicted. The overall pie this holiday season is expected to grow slowly. One prominent estimate puts spending growth at 2.8 percent, about half of last year. That has retailers scrambling to protect their own slice and steal market share from competitors.
Across the country, some backlash is brewing among shoppers and workers. A Target worker in Omaha, Neb., started an online petition at Change.org to ask his employer to reconsider its midnight Black Friday opening so employees could spend all of Thanksgiving with their families. By Saturday, the petition had more than 186,000 signatures. A similar petition by a Best Buy worker in Florida has gathered more than 12,600 names.
Best Buy’s CEO has said he feels “terrible” about opening at midnight. Last year, the chain opened at 5 a.m. But market pressures and competition pushed that opening up, he said.
Black Friday earned that name, apocryphally at least, by being the day many retailers swung from losses (“red”) to profits (“black”). The pace of Black Friday creep has picked up in recent years. For example, Concord Mills had its first midnight opening the day after Thanksgiving just five years ago.
Angie Backus, an elder-care worker in Charlotte, said she’s shopped Black Friday in the past but was turned off by the crowds. She’s offended by the intrusion of Black Friday into Thanksgiving itself.
“I think that’s ridiculous,” she said. “Thanksgiving is a time you spend with your family and friends, not shoving and pushing for some $5 pants.”
More shoppers expected
So far, surveys from the National Retail Federation and the International Council of Shopping Centers show more consumers say they’re planning to shop this Black Friday, compared with last year’s.
The NRF survey found the percentage of consumers who said they were “definitely” shopping on Black Friday rose to 33 percent, up from 27 percent at this time last year. The ICSC found similar results. It also found that 16 percent of consumers surveyed are planning to shop on Thanksgiving Day.
Cohen, the retail analyst, said retailers will keep pushing hours earlier until it’s not profitable for them.
“To get a retailer to back off of this, it will take a retailer not making money doing it,” Cohen said. “Those that shop in those hours are volunteering to shop at those hours….Retailers are trying to beat each other to the early dollar.”
The extra expense of opening for a few more hours is a relatively small investment with the promise of easy returns, Cohen said.
“The two most expensive processes are rent they’ve already paid and products they’ve already bought,” he said. “What’s left? The expense of putting the lights on and the expense of staffing the store.”
Some retailers are sticking with more traditional opening times anyway, positioning themselves counter to the prevailing trend. Nordstrom has prominently displayed signs saying the stores won’t decorate for Christmas until the day after Thanksgiving. “We just like the idea of celebrating one holiday at a time,” the sign at SouthPark mall says.
JCPenney is sticking with a 4 a.m. opening time. “We wanted to give our associates Thanksgiving Day to spend with their friends and families,” said spokeswoman Sarah Kelleher. “Should shoppers want to start their Black Friday shopping earlier, our Black Friday specials will be available on jcp.com on Thanksgiving Day.”
Online shopping has continued to grow, and retailers like JCPenney are ramping up their online offerings and suggesting that shoppers turn to the Web for their shopping fix on Thanksgiving. Belk is offering Thanksgiving deals on its website.
The e-commerce consulting firm eMarketer is forecasting online holiday sales will rise to $46.7 billion this year, up 17 percent.
Brick-and-mortar stores still command a huge segment of the market, however, and stores that don’t open early for Black Friday risk losing market share, Cohen said. Last year, Black Friday was the biggest shopping day of the year, with $10.7 billion in sales, according to the retail tracking firm ShopperTrak. But sales rose only 0.6 percent, meaning the number of available dollars didn’t grow much.
“The pie is not going to get much bigger” this year, said Cohen. “There’s a small amount of growth to be gotten, but it’s really more about protecting the piece of the pie you have already.”
In the end, Cohen said that any consumer blowback over Black Friday creep likely will blow over, as it has in the past.
“These crazy hours always meet with a great deal of skepticism and wonderment,” said Cohen. “The consumer will very quickly change their tune if they see deep discounts being offered.”
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