Bloomington, Minnesota
CNN Business
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The rise of e-commerce in recent years has taken its toll on personal shopping, the decline of once-popular brick-and-mortar stores and malls in the process.
As a result, Black Friday, the traditional first day of the Christmas shopping season and a day once known for door-to-door deals and throngs of holiday shoppers, has lost some of its luster.
But not here in Bloomington, Minnesota.
At 4:30 a.m. Friday, hundreds of people were waiting in line at the main entrance of the Mall of America. The nation’s largest shopping and entertainment center — a 5.6 million square foot behemoth — was set to open its doors for Black Friday in 150 minutes.
Chilly temperatures be damned, these early birds and the tens of thousands more to follow in the hours that followed showed 30 years after the mall opened for business that the spirit of Black Friday still reigns in some places.
“The holidays are our version of the Super Bowl,” said Jill Renslow, Mall of America executive vice president of business development and marketing.
Shoppers take photos with Santa Claus at the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota.
The first 4,000 people in line for Black Friday were eligible for a special scratch-off donation contest.
People enter the Mall of America to shop on Black Friday.
A shopper carries a Nintendo-themed Lego set through the mall.
Black Friday serves as the start of the holiday shopping season here, since mall officials decided seven years ago to close on Thanksgiving. Back then, “holiday creep” was becoming more pronounced with the advent of “Grey Thursday,” when Black Friday-like deals and super-early opening hours reached Thanksgiving.
The start of this year’s holidays has special significance for the mall, which is not only celebrating its 30th anniversary, but also a return to a pre-pandemic level of operation.
“[Shoppers] they want to shop specifically on Black Friday, but they want to shop brick and mortar,” Renslow said. “They want to be able to have the immediacy of bringing that item home — especially if there’s something specific on their list .”
About 100,000 people a day walk through the mall doors, but it’s usually double that on Black Friday. In some years – notably 2018 and 2019 – this traffic reached approximately 250,000.
Foot traffic has been better this year than in 2021, but still remains softer than before the 2019 pandemic, likely due to a decline in international travel, Renslow said.
However, sales are up 9% from last year and 5% during 2019, she said. (These figures are not adjusted for inflation.)
Still, a lot of uncertainty hangs over the nation’s holiday season, said Jadrian Wooten, an associate professor in Virginia Tech’s Department of Economics.
“This particular year will be a true test of the traditional Black Friday mall experience,” he said.
Decades of high inflation and growing economic uncertainty continue to weigh on consumers, making them even more conscious and frugal.
That’s certainly true for public school teacher Molly Timmerman. The mother of two said she is planning to spend “much, much less” this year than in years past. “I’m very worried about the economy,” she said.
Héctor plans to take a very deliberate and minimalist approach to shopping this year, hunting down deals with her 13- and 10-year-old daughters. Most importantly, though, she wants to enjoy her time with them at the shopping and entertainment center she first visited as an 8th grader the year it opened.
The Mall of America was America’s brand new megamall, hosting the first Black Friday on November 27, 1992.
An estimated 170,000 people flocked to the three-story monolith that day, dwarfing the site’s previous occupant, Metropolitan Stadium, where the Minnesota Twins and Minnesota Vikings played for 21 years. At 78 hectares, the mall could hold 59 football fields.
Black Friday patrons came from far and wide that year, with many locals hosting out-of-town guests curious to see the colossal commercial and entertainment center, according to newspaper reports of the time.
Those guests were greeted by an explosion of Christmas decorations that took 30 people three weeks to install, including 1,300 mega-wreaths featuring Snoopy, the cartoon beagle from the comic strip ‘Peanuts’. At the time, the main attraction in the center of the mall was the Knott’s Camp Snoopy amusement park.
Afterward, retailers hoped for a bountiful Black Friday, a return to better times as the country recovered from the recession of the early 1990s. And while foot traffic ultimately fell short of expectations, shoppers still got plenty bids and kept noisy cash registers.
“By 11 a.m., we had already sold what we would on a normal weekend,” Abercrombie & Fitch store manager Hilary Werner told the Minneapolis Star-Tribune at the time.
Thirty years later, business was alive again at Abercrombie & Fitch. Shoppers flocked to the racks and picked out sweaters and pants, including what the store described as “90s-style” high-rise jeans.
After an expansion in 2015, the mall is now even bigger, with an additional floor and an expanded footprint to more than 96 acres (or about 13 more football fields, for those keeping count). Nickelodeon Universe, the massive indoor amusement park and its orange and green roller coasters, has replaced the Peanuts gang at the core of the mall.
A Black Friday sale sign hangs in a store window.
A shopper takes a break next to a giant nutcracker decoration.
The decked halls 30 years later are full of snowflakes, ornaments and larger-than-life trees. Down the west corridor, strands of white lights drip from the ceiling.
With a backdrop of Christmas music playing from the speakers (including multiple rounds of Mariah Carey’s 1994 mega-holiday hit, “All I Want for Christmas is You”), and amid the pervasive aroma of Wetzel’s Pretzels and Cinnabon Dough , shoppers were loaded with bags after hitting sales that ranged from 20% to 70% off.
On Friday morning, the deals served as the main lure for many of the Mall of America’s early birds, some who flocked to the mall on Thanksgiving Day. be one of the first 200 shoppers to receive a gift card and the first 4,000 shoppers to receive a scratch ticket offering mystery gifts and promotions.
First in line were the Rands from Rochester, Minnesota. The family of six arrived at 4pm on Thursday and camped overnight with “tons of blankets”, they said.
Crystal Rands, 40, grew up in Mississippi going to Black Friday with her mother and has continued the tradition with her family. Online shopping can be convenient, she said, but “I still like the rush and being around people.”
Her family has been fundraising all year so they and their four children can enjoy the experience
Newlyweds Alex and Sierra Weber drove five hours from Rockford, Illinois. While some families come prepared with processing battle plans for their power purchases, the Webers just wanted to see what stood out.
“We find what we find and if we don’t find anything, we eat food and enjoy the attractions,” said Alex Weber, 33.
The Rands of Rochester, Minnesota, were first in line. They arrived at 4pm on Thursday.
Jordan Zabel and Mandy Schoultz camped overnight in an ice fishing tent.
Newlyweds Alex and Sierra Weber made the five-hour drive from Rockford, Illinois.
Hundreds of people lined up outside the mall before it opened.
Next, Jordan Zabel, 28, and cousin Mandi Schoultz, 31, stepped out of their Eskimo QuickFish ice fishing hideaway, where they played card games and watched “Wednesday” on Netflix.
This year’s Christmas will be a little toned down from past holiday shopping seasons. “I’m definitely spending less on what I can,” Schoultz said.
Brooklyn Park resident Devon Shepherd, 18, bundled up and jumped up and down to battle the 28-degree air, flashed a big smile when asked about his Black Friday plans.
The chance to get a gift card lured him and friend Esi Adamaley, also 18, into the early morning line despite the temperature.
But while Christmas shopping may have been the impetus for it their arrival at 1:45 a.m. At 5:45 a.m., Shepherd was all the louder for the experience.
“At first, it was just going to be Christmas shopping, but now it’s the experience,” he said. “I’m still going there and I’ll shop till I drop.”
