After your turkey dinner this Thanksgiving, perhaps you’d like to go buy some rolling tobacco or get your nose pierced?
If that’s the case, you’re in luck. The Black Friday creep is alive and well in Connecticut, and it means more stores than ever will open Thanksgiving Day at Greater Hartford malls and shopping centers, and at an earlier hour too.
Retail experts say the stores, which include many national brands and even some small shops, are following the lead of anchor tenants that have been experimenting in recent years — many say successfully — with Thanksgiving hours.
Connecticut retailers are looking for a strong start to the holiday shopping season, which is shorter this year due to a later than usual Thanksgiving.
Retailers are also keenly aware of forecasts for a modest uptick in November-December shopping. Wells Fargo predicts consumers will spend 3.7 percent more this holiday season than a year ago. The National Retail Federation is a bit more optimistic predicting a 3.9 percent increase in spending.
Open it and they will come
Leading the Black Friday creep this year in Greater Hartford is Westfarms, where for the first time, the majority of the mall’s 160 retail tenants will open at 8 p.m. on Thanksgiving, according to Kevin Keenan, general manager of the Taubman Centers-owned property.
It’s a four-hour shift in just two years. In 2011, a few Westfarms stores started opening at midnight on Black Friday. Keenan said the extended hours have become an important way to kick off the busiest weeks of the year for his tenants.
“Those late-night, early-morning hours have been very successful for our retailers,” Keenan said. “I expect very, very large crowds.”
Tenant leases at Westfarms vary, but some require stores to open on Thanksgiving, while anchor tenant Nordstrom can and will remain closed, Keenan said.
Meanwhile, The Shoppes at Buckland Hills in Manchester plans to have more than 30 of its stores open at 8 p.m. on Thanksgiving, said Nancy Murray, general manager of the approximately 120-store plaza.
Last year, between 30 and 40 percent of the mall’s businesses opened at midnight, and Sears opened at 8 p.m. Murray said the other stores’ managers seemed to notice the foot traffic that Sears got last year.
“This is new, the fact that we have this many retailers opening on, and the mall’s opening on, Thanksgiving,” Murray said. “Last year was very successful when we opened at midnight.”
Among the stores opening at 8 p.m. is Piercing Pagoda, which is owned by Zales Corp.
Roxane Barry, a Zales spokeswoman, acknowledged that the company is influenced by what its retail neighbors are doing.
“We are looking at all of our stores and making our decisions store by store as to when we open,” Barry said. “And it’s largely determined by what the other stores are doing. If the guests come into the mall and they’re ready to shop, we want to be able to open.”
Large retailers lead the pack
Thanksgiving store hours are spreading across the country, led by a number of large national retailers.
Kohl’s, Macy’s, Target, Sears and J.C. Penney stores will open Thursday at 8 p.m. Walmart announced it will open at 6 a.m. Best Buy has chosen 6 p.m.
And representing a new extreme, K-Mart — which has stores in Vernon and Cromwell — will open at 6 a.m. Thanksgiving Day and won’t close until 11 p.m. the next day. Last year, it closed for several early morning hours on Black Friday.
An unannounced number of stores at the Enfield Square and Westfield-Meriden malls — many large anchors — will also open on Thanksgiving, managers there said.
At the Promenade Shoppes at Evergreen Walk in South Windsor, Old Navy and several other retailers and restaurants will be open as they choose, a spokeswoman said.
Race to the bottom? Or giving shoppers what they want?
With more retailers opening on Thanksgiving, there is less risk that shops will anger customers who feel companies should give their workers the holiday off, said Tony Cashman, president and CEO of Glastonbury communications firm Cashman+Katz.
“I think we’re beyond that,” Cashman said. “It really comes down to competition. We’re in a very competitive environment.” By opening on Thanksgiving, retailers are trying to give themselves the best chance of grabbing a piece of the somewhat stagnant holiday spending pie, said John Rand, senior vice president of retail insights for Kantar Retail, which has operations in Wilton.
“The dollars people have to spend are limited,” Rand said. “We don’t have an enormously strong growth of shoppers.”
If competitors are open, retailers feel pressure to do the same, despite any blowback that may come from upset employees or customers, he said.
And how many people who stay home on Thanksgiving are truly going to skip shopping at a store later on because they think employees should have the day off?
“It’s risky in both directions, but it’s a little more risky not to be open when everyone is waving money around in the middle of the mall,” Rand said.
Many stores won’t open
Not every shopping center is a part of the holiday hours creep.
At Blue Back Square in West Hartford, the Cheesecake Factory will be open for dinner and the movie theater will also be open, but other shops will be dark, said General Manager Will Lorenz.
Lorenz said he’d be fine with any of his retailers having Thanksgiving hours, but he doesn’t think shoppers would line up in the wee hours of morning like they might at a mall.
The lunch crowd is usually the first rush at Blue Back on Black Friday.
Though Blue Back is a popular shopping destination, Lorenz said it’s more “lifestyle retail” than “shock retail.”
“I don’t have Best Buy or Walmart here,” Lorenz said.
As more and more stores are open though, the ones that don’t might have a chance to distinguish themselves.
For example, P.C. Richardson & Son, which has stores in Newington, Manchester, and Enfield, buys full-page ads in New York and Connecticut newspapers every year touting the fact they won’t be open.
The ad this year describes Thanksgiving store hours as “disrespect of family values.”
“At some point, that actually becomes the way you distinguish yourself,” said Rand, the retail consultant. “’They are taking a position that some shoppers will appreciate that statement, hold off on their purchases and come to them by preference.”
