Black Friday crowds still expected

BISMARCK, N.D. (KFYR) - A French writer once said, “the more things change, the more they stay the same”. Black Friday happens to be of those things.

Black Friday used to look like this, crowds of people waiting in line to scoop up a good deal on their holiday shopping lists. While Kirkwood Mall is still planning for their regular crowd of early bird shoppers, they say stores handle the sales season a bit differently.

“I think the biggest thing that we’ve seen as a change for Black Friday is that the stores are starting their sales earlier, so people are shopping the Black Friday sales earlier. It’s kind of become a full week or a full month instead of just the one day,” said Mikalah Auer, marketing director for Kirkwood Mall. Small businesses also have had to change with the times. They try to capitalize on the whole weekend instead of just one day.

“So, if it’s Black Friday and Small Business Saturday, sometimes they connect those two shopping days together. Sometimes they split them out a little bit to make them more excited or more interesting, trying to get customers to repeat. And then also, creating Cyber Monday sales as well,” said Dawn Kopp, executive director of the Downtown Business Association of Bismarck.

Both Auer and Kopp agree that although things were changing before the pandemic, it definitely impacted how people shop for the holidays and what shoppers expect from their retailers. Here’s a little piece of trivia for you to share at the dinner table. According to one report, Black Friday was coined all the way back in 1951. But it was dubbed so because of workers calling out sick the day after Thanksgiving to take advantage of a 4-day weekend.

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