Vancouver retailers are gearing up for another major round of Black Friday shopping later this week, kicking off a holiday season in which national sales in November and December are expected to rise between 4.3 and 4.8 percent over 2017, according to estimates from the National Retail Federation.
“Black Friday is very popular among the big-box retailers here,” said Chandra Chase, Greater Vancouver Chamber of Commerce communications director. “While there is no sales tax in Oregon, it doesn’t seem to impact the long lines outside in the wee hours in the morning for those fantastic deals.”
At Vancouver Mall, stores will be open on Thursday between 6 p.m. and midnight. Retailers are largely free to set their own schedules, according to manager J.B. Schutte, and the mall’s only requirement is that participating stores must open their doors by 8 p.m.
“Our stores that want to open on Thanksgiving will be open by 8 — if they want to,” he said. “Since the anchor stores have started opening on Thanksgiving, we have a pretty busy crowd from around 8 p.m. to midnight.”
The midnight deadline isn’t official, he added, but seems to be the consensus choice. The mall’s anchor retail outlets own their spaces rather than leasing them, so they’re free to set whatever Thanksgiving hours they want, and they’ve all chosen to be open from 6 p.m. Thursday to 1 a.m. Friday this year.
Some of the anchors have done midnight Black Friday openings in the past, Schutte said, but this year continues a more recent trend of stores opening for a late night on Thursday, then closing down overnight and reopening for a standard day on Friday. The mall’s visitor traffic for the weekend overall has tended to be about the same in both scenarios, he said.
Black Friday will be the last hurrah for the Vancouver Mall Sears, one of the original anchor tenants dating back to the mall’s opening in 1977. The struggling retail chain announced in August that it would close 46 locations in November, including the Vancouver Mall location. The company filed for bankruptcy in October and announced it would close an additional 142 stores by the end of the year.
According to Schutte, the Vancouver Sears will be open on Black Friday and through the weekend before closing for good on Sunday night, although the store has already been working to sell off its inventory and has been largely emptied.
“The store is almost stripped bare,” he said. “It’s down to just racks of clothes mostly.”
Schutte said that he expects both Thursday and Friday to be incredibly busy days for the mall, although he says the mall stores don’t usually have customers camped out in front waiting for the opening hour.
“I’ve watched lines at Old Navy,” he said, “but not like I witnessed when I ran Walmarts and Best Buys.”
Still, he said, there’s always a reliable crowd of shoppers on both Black Friday and the previous evening.
Schutte said he theorizes that the 8 p.m. window tends to be popular because it’s late enough to give people time to digest the piles of Thanksgiving food, and some people — especially younger visitors — might need a break from the family environment.
“Thanksgiving evening is definitely a younger crowd — the 30-somethings,” he said. “I was shocked 10 years ago when we opened on Thanksgiving for the first time and the place was packed.”
Big-box retailers at other Vancouver-area shopping centers are also predicting a busy Black Friday weekend, buoyed by strong retail sales numbers throughout the year, although Target, Walmart and Fred Meyer are all taking slightly different approaches.
Vancouver-area Target stores will open from 5 p.m. Thursday until 1 a.m. Friday, and then reopen at 7 a.m. Friday. Walmart stores will keep operating on their regular hours (the two east Vancouver “supercenter” stores are open 24 hours), but will begin offering specific in-store Black Friday deals at 6 p.m. Thursday.
Fred Meyer stores in the region will be open for normal business from 7 a.m. to 4 p.m. Thursday, but will be closed in the evening to give customers time with their families, according to regional spokesman Jeffery Temple. The stores will reopen at 5 a.m. Friday, with free coffee and doughnuts available and gift cards for the first 100 shoppers.
“The expectations are for a really strong holiday,” Temple said. “We’ve had a pretty fantastic trend for the last few years.”
The biggest Black Friday traffic driver for Fred Meyer tends to be a half-off sale on socks, he said, although electronics and toys also see strong sales, and this year the retail chain has been able to add some toys to its lineup that were formerly exclusive to the now-shuttered Toys R Us store chain.
Managers at the Jantzen Beach Center in Oregon are also preparing for a strong Black Friday showing, including many shoppers from across the river. According to Jennifer Maisch, director of communications at Jantzen Beach owner Kimco Realty, an average of 51.2 percent of the shopping center’s customers last year were from Washington, but on Black Friday that number jumped to 62.5 percent.
Smaller local retailers also have plans for the weekend. In Camas, some downtown businesses have joined a Downtown Camas Association program in which customers randomly draw from a box of holiday perks at each store on Friday.
“We call it Little Box Friday because we don’t have any big box (stores) in downtown,” said Downtown Camas Association executive director Carrie Schulstad.
The Greater Vancouver Chamber of Commerce also runs a program called Small Business Saturday, aimed at the roughly 120 member businesses with fewer than 15 employees, who tend to lack the funding for their own marketing to compete for holiday sales. The program was founded in 2013, Chase said.
The chamber hosts a social media hashtag contest each year starting Nov. 1 and continuing through Saturday. Participating businesses encourage customers and others to post about them with the hashtag #GVCCgrant2018. Based on the posts, 25 companies are selected as finalists, and three are chosen to win $2,000 each.
“The goal of the chamber is to use our network to raise the collective voice of small business,” Chase said. “Helping one another is often a strategy used here.”
According to the National Retail Federation’s 2018 holiday spending forecast, total holiday sales in the United States are expected to be between $717.45 billion and $720.89 billion this year. Based on annual surveys of consumers in late October and early November, the group estimates that 164 million consumers plan to shop at some point over the Thanksgiving weekend, and the average consumer says they will spend $1,007.24 during the overall holiday season.
“Confidence is near an all-time high, unemployment is the lowest we’ve seen in decades and take-home wages are up,” said federation CEO Matthew Shay. “All of that is reflected in consumers’ buying plans.”
The impact of recent Chinese tariffs on the pricing of consumer goods is expected to remain minimal this year, Shay added, due to retailers having stockpiled record amounts of merchandise earlier in the year.
