By Michael Balderston
Thanksgiving is full of traditions – the turkey, the parade, football – but almost as popular as the holiday itself is what happens the next day, or as it has been in recent years, later that evening.
Black Friday is a national sensation where waves of people descend upon their local retail stores and malls for discounted items to kick-off the holiday season. Every year there are videos of amped up customers rushing through the front doors to try and be the first to get their hands on the holiday’s hot item; but what is it like for those working Black Friday?
Robbie Stark, General Manager of Fair Oaks Mall in Fairfax, shared how he prepares for the busiest shopping day of the year and what it’s like to stare down a wall of eager shoppers. This is an edited version of our conversation.
Why does Black Friday keep starting earlier?
The big driver is customers. For retailers it’s all about being open so your customers can get in. You can’t ring up any sales unless the doors are open and if the customers don’t show up then you start thinking, ‘Well, I’m spending money and I’m not making any money.’ Last year we opened at 8 p.m. and the mall was packed. The mall was jammed packed with people and in fact, kind of interestingly, packed full of families. Either they had been together all day and needed to get out of the house or it was ‘Are we going to go do something tonight?’
Are there any special preparations for Black Friday?
Black Friday is not the biggest sales generation day of the year, usually that happens the Saturday before Christmas… but it is one of the highest traffic days. Nobody’s at work and everybody wants to go off and do stuff and it kicks off the season, it’s tradition for a lot of people. So for us, we do a lot of things to get prepared. We install different traffic barricades so that we make sure we control the traffic flow. We bring in a lot of extra security. We manually control our traffic signal. We hire off-duty police officers to help us control the traffic signals just outside the property so that we keep traffic flowing really well… it can get backed up and become a real challenge and that could ruin somebody’s shopping experience before they even get on the property… And then inside the mall there’s a lot of preparation. We’ve got to adjust all of our schedules, so we’ve got to adjust air conditioning to the lights being on everywhere to staffing level, we have to address all of those so we are ready for all those masses of people.
Have you ever experienced the classic Black Friday situation of a mass of people waiting outside the doors eager to get in?
I have experienced it at other retail settings, but not in the shopping mall setting. Here at Fair Oaks we get a lot of people that come and there are specific stores they are interested in. We do a lot of work to make sure we don’t let the crowds gather in a way that would cause those kinds of problems, we learned from the past.
What is it like standing on the other side of that glass?
It is exhilarating and it’s a little scary. At one point in my career I ran a big box store and even though we lined them up and we had our teaser type deals, which were limited…, they still get so excited to get in there and get the things. It can be a little overwhelming but at the same time it’s exhilarating. It’s a lot of fun, people are super excited.
Did you ever do Black Friday shopping?
Last year, I was here before we opened on Thanksgiving and worked late into the night and then actually drove from here at the mall to another store that was opening really early in the morning for a deal that I saw. I hadn’t been to bed yet, they opened at 5 or 6 in the morning, I went straight there, hopped in line and got the things I was looking for then headed home and got a nap. I’m guilty, you see a great deal it’s hard to pass up.