Serving Gogebic, Iron and Ontonagon Counties
Serving Gogebic, Iron and Ontonagon Counties
By RICHARD JENKINS
While many larger stores started offering their bargains Thursday night, several local retailers reported successful Black Friday sales.
“We were slammed starting at 8 a.m., and this is probably the first time it’s let up,” Hobby Wheel owner Eric Fitting said at around 3 p.m.
Fitting said it was probably the best Black Friday the store has seen in 15 years, which he attributed to not only a healthy economy, but also the recent snowstorms.
“Anytime we have snow, it seems like business picks up,” Fitting said.
Given Friday’s success, Fitting said the store is already calling extra employees for Small Business Saturday today. Fitting explained the store has traditionally done better that day than Black Friday.
Bob Abelman, owner of Abelman Clothing, reported similar success as locals and those returning to the Gogebic Range for the holidays visited the Bessemer store.
“That’s always nice, to see familiar faces,” Abelman said.
He also said the traffic through the store had been busy for most of the day.
Much like Fitting, Abelman said he thinks the recent weather played a role in shoppers coming out to the store.
“We’ve been selling a lot of boots and outer wear,” Abelman said, adding the entire month of November has been good for winter-wear due to the snow and cold temperatures.
Abelman is expecting the rest of the weekend to be busy — a good start to the holiday shopping season.
Along with independent retailers, the local Walmart was also busy with shoppers both looking for everyday purchases and the day’s special deals.
Elsewhere around the country, a similar turnout was reported.
Shoppers spent their holiday lined up outside the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota, by 4 p.m. Thursday, and the crowd had swelled to 3,000 people by the time doors opened at 5 Friday morning. In Ohio, a group of women was so determined, they booked a hotel room Thursday night to be closer to the stores. In New York City, one woman went straight from a dance club to a department store in the middle of the night.
The holiday shopping season presents a big test for a U.S. economy, whose overall growth so far this year has relied on a burst of consumer spending. Americans upped their spending during the first half of 2018 at the strongest pace in four years, yet retail sales gains have tapered off recently. The sales totals over the next month will be a good indicator as to whether consumers simply paused to catch their breath or feel less optimistic about the economy in 2019.
The National Retail Federation, the nation’s largest retail trade group, is expecting holiday retail sales to increase as much as 4.8 percent over 2017 for a total of $720.89 billion. The sales growth marks a slowdown from last year’s 5.3 percent, but remains healthy.
The retail economy is also tilting steeply toward online shopping. Over the past 12 months, purchases at non-store retailers such as Amazon have jumped 12.1 percent as sales at traditional department stores have slumped 0.3 percent. Adobe Analytics reported Thursday that Thanksgiving reached a record $3.7 billion in online retail sales, up 28 percent from the same year ago period. For Black Friday, online spending was on track to hit more than $6.4 billion, according to Adobe.
Editor’s note: The Associated Press contributed to this story.