Some retailers to delay Black Friday sales

Big box retailers’ Black Friday sales usually start at the same time most families sit down for turkey, stuffing and potatoes.

Some national retailers have opted to delay Black Friday sales until — wait for it — Friday.

Retailers like Petco, Home Depot and Barnes and Noble will keep their doors closed until Friday morning, bucking the trend of other retailers like Wal-Mart that enable shopping sprees at 6 p.m. Thursday.

The turned tide was welcomed by employees who can now spend time with their families.

“I’ve worked retail jobs for a while, and I’ve never worked a Black Friday,” Kevin Keen, a Cricket representative working at GameStop, said. “I completely expected to be open Thursday later in the evening, but having Thanksgiving to spend with my family is always welcome in my book. Spending time with my family is great, especially when you can get everyone together. That usually only happens twice a year, Christmas and Thanksgiving.”

He noted, too, that stores like GameStop are incorporating sales earlier than Black Friday.

“It’s much less stressful for us to have people come in gradually as opposed to everyone coming in at once on one day, looking for a million different sales,” Keen said. “With it being spread out, you get small rushes of people looking for specific things, and it makes it less stressful for us. It also probably helps the consumer, too, because they can pinpoint exactly what they want to get on a particular day.”

Staples, similar to other retailers that have touted their closed Thanksgiving doors, used to embrace Turkey Day shopping. They will instead attempt to direct consumers to online deals the same day instead of waiting in the bitter cold for hours to get a new gadget.

“We want our customers and associates to enjoy Thanksgiving their own way,” Staples executive Demos Parneros said in a statement.

There is also a downward trend in Black Friday spending, likely making profit margins less appealing.

Black Friday weekend revenue dropped 11 percent from $57.3 billion in 2013 to $50.9 billion in 2014, according to the National Retail Federation, which cited several reasons for the decrease in weekend spending.

Cyber Monday firmly took its spot as the top online spending day in the United States, according to comScore, in the past few years. The big online shopping day once barely edged out other days, but has grown twice as much since 2010 when it first topped $1 billion spent.

Small Business Saturday has also cut into Black Friday profits. Shoppers spent $5.5 billion at small businesses on the day in 2012 and topped $14 billion each of the past two years, according to Small Business Saturday Consumer Insights Survey.

Like Keen observed, retailers offered shopping steals well before Thanksgiving, some as early as the first week of November.

So, no matter what deal you get on what day, Black Friday is less of a big deal than it once was.

Some retailers, be it for publicity or practicality, decided they could keep the lights off for Thanksgiving.

This story was originally published November 25, 2015 at 12:24 PM with the headline "Some retailers to delay Black Friday sales."