Mall of America closed for Thanksgiving: Will big box stores follow suit?
Packed to the brim with every kind of store you can imagine, the Mall of America is聽not the kind of place you'd expect to choose family values over making a profit. But聽this year, the Mall of America is taking a bold聽stance, announcing plans to stay closed on Thanksgiving Day, and put the "Friday" back in Black Friday.
While stores inside the mall will have the option to stay open on Thanksgiving,听聽says mall officials don't expect many businesses to do so.
"We鈥檝e been talking about this for months, looking at the numbers, looking at the pros and the cons," said Jill Renslow, senior vice president of marketing and business development at the Mall of America. "We鈥檙e excited to give this day back to our employees so they can celebrate with their families ... and bring that special magic back to Black Friday."
I grew up the Twin Cities, so a good chunk聽of my youth was spent wandering aimlessly around the vast shrine聽to consumer culture聽that is the Mall of America. If you've never been there, it's worth a trip for the theme park alone, but shopping聽was always my main motivation. So聽I was pretty shocked by this announcement.
While it's likely that the mall doesn't see much of a profit from staying open on Thanksgiving, it's still a striking聽move. If聽the Mall of America, the biggest shopping center in the country, is saying no to Thanksgiving hours, does this mean that other brands will follow suit?
We've been tracking Black Friday store hours since 2007, and 2015 was the first year we actually saw a pushback from major retailers on Thanksgiving hours. As you can see from the graph below, Black "Friday" sales have been slowly but surely encroaching on Thanksgiving dinnertime for the past several years. In 2014, all the major retailers we tracked for this study were open by 6 p.m. on Thanksgiving.
But last year,听聽decided to聽push its聽sale back to聽early Friday morning hours, and this move聽brought the聽average Black Friday sale's opening time down from 5:43 p.m. in 2014, to 7:05 p.m. in 2015. In addition to this, outdoor supply retailer聽made a bold statement by closing on both Thanksgiving AND Black Friday and聽, and聽we tallied up a list of聽. These retailers included big names like聽,听,听听补苍诲听, and it's our personal dream that, in 2016, more of Black Friday's heavy hitters, like聽听辞谤, might surprise everyone by disavowing Thanksgiving hours.
Is that likely to happen? Probably not. But聽we also don't expect to see any major retailers opening any earlier than last year, either. We predict all the major Black Friday retailers will likely opt to keep their 2015 hours聽this year, but we could be in for some Black Friday surprises in the coming months!
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