Black Friday and Thanksgiving Day shopping by the numbers
• Nearly six in 10 Americans — an estimated 137.4 million people — plan to or are considering shopping during Thanksgiving weekend, including in-store and online shopping from Thursday through Sunday.• Black Friday is still the most popular day to shop across all age groups.• On Cyber Monday, 36 percent of consumers plan to shop online, up from 34 percent in 2015.• American consumers plan to spend an average $935.58 during the holiday shopping season this year.• Nearly six in 10 plan to buy for themselves, spending an average $139.61, up 4 percent from last year.Source: The National Retail Federations’s annual Thanksgiving holiday shopping survey conducted by Prosper Insights.
Retail sales to soar, or stay flat?
The National Retail Federation expects retail sales in November and December (excluding autos, gas and restaurants) to increase 3.6 percent this year to $655.8 billion.However, a Chattanooga Times Free Press survey of 360 voters leaving the polls during the presidential election and early voting found that 58.3 percent of respondents thought they’d spend the same this year on holiday gifts, 30 percent thought they’d spend less and only 11.1 percent expected to spend more.
Black Friday won't come early tonight at Chattanooga's two big indoor shopping malls.
The shops inside Hamilton Place and Northgate will stay closed this Thanksgiving and won't open until 6 a.m. Friday.
That's because CBL & Associates Properties Inc., the Chattanooga-based owner of shopping malls in 31 states, decided to give mall employees - and shoppers - the opportunity to stay home and enjoy Thanksgiving night with their families.
"This year, we decided enough was enough," CBL spokeswoman Stacey Keating said. "This is the first year in four or five years that we've decided to close on Thanksgiving."
Black Friday gets its name because it's such a big shopping day it's often the first day of the year stores start to go into the black, or show a profit.
But CBL doesn't think stores inside the malls will take a hit to their bottom line by taking Thanksgiving off. Keating said sales figures show that opening on Thanksgiving didn't increase sales - it just spread out shopping during the holiday weekend.
"We just saw that sales and traffic were being spread out over more hours," she said.
However, CBL's closure doesn't apply to malls' anchor stores, which have their own entrances and exits, or to movie theaters.
"The department stores, with the exception of Dillard's, will be open," Keating said. Dillard's department store always stays closed on Thanksgiving Day, she said. "JCPenney, Belk, Sears - those will all be open on Thanksgiving. It's just the interior shops at Hamilton Place and Northgate [that will close]."
And CBL won't keep all of its shopping centers closed, only its "portfolio of market-dominant regional shopping centers" - or 72 shopping centers that are pretty much the only game in town, such as Walnut Square Mall in Dalton, Ga.
Meanwhile, other Chattanooga-area stores will be open tonight, including Kohl's department store at 5953 Highway 153 in a Hixson strip mall. It will open at 6 p.m. today and stay open until midnight Friday.
"It's just based upon hearing what our customers want," store manager Carry Stevenson said. "We'll be busy."
It's actually fun to work on Thanksgiving night and Black Friday, he said.
"You might not think it is. My [sales] associates, at first, get a little nervous," Stevenson said. "But the ones that have been around tell the other ones, 'It's so much fun. The energy is just phenomenal.'"
"Our customers are in a good mood, as well," he said. "Time just flies by."
But Ann Muller, a hardcore Black Friday shopper for more than 20 years, never bothered with Thanksgiving night shopping. Muller, a Cleveland, Tenn., resident, has gotten up early on Thanksgiving morning to shop at such stores as Kmart and Big Lots. And she gets up around 1 a.m. on Black Friday to go to such stores as Target and Kohl's.
But she never shopped after dinner on Thanksgiving.
"We always had family in," Muller said. "I always had a houseful."
She also thought that store employees should be able to stay home on Thanksgiving night.
"I feel for the employees," she said. "It's our choice to go out and shop. They don't have the option."
While retailers these days may disagree on whether to stay open on Thanksgiving, Steve Smith remembers a time when Chattanooga-area stores weren't open on Sundays.
Smith used to run "Big Hearted Smitty's," a "buy here, pay here" used car dealership on Rossville Boulevard that was reborn in 2012 as Phoenix Auto on Chattanooga's south side.
He moved to Chattanooga around 1970 to work as the credit manager for the W.T. Grant department store at what's now a Big Lots at 1830 LaFayette Road in Fort Oglethorpe.
Customers went wild when W.T. Grant - a chain comparable to Kmart before W.T. Grant went bankrupt in 1975 - opened on Sundays, Smith said.
"We had to have police out there directing traffic. It made us one of the hottest stores in the country," he said. "We were the only store [open Sunday] in the whole area. There wasn't anybody else doing it."
Smith isn't a fan of Thanksgiving Day shopping, however. He'd rather stay home.
"Thanksgiving is for giving thanks," Smith said. "What's one day going to hurt?"
Contact staff writer Tim Omarzu at tomarzu@timesfreepress.com or www.facebook.com/MeetsForBusiness or twitter.com/meetforbusiness or 423-757-6651.