Tim Harty, The Business Times

November 28 remains the latest day Thanksgiving can land on the calendar, but it’s not the unwelcome houseguest it used to be for retail stores.

Thanksgiving falling on Nov. 28 as it did this year leaves a mere 26 days of shopping until Christmas. But the shortest possible traditional holiday-shopping season is softened by the drastic redefining of Black Friday sales in recent years. No longer is Black Friday reserved only for the day after Thanksgiving. Its name gets attached to sales throughout October and early November for some retailers.

Those early Black Friday sales are another challenge that is harder to combat for small, local businesses than for the national retailers who populate most large malls. So, they adapt the best they can.

At Board Fox Games, 623 Main St. in Grand Junction, co-owner Trudi Wagner isn’t one to offer sales, but she does on Black Friday and the next day, Small Business Saturday.

“That’s usually about the only sale we do during the year because our margins aren’t good enough for us to be able to do sales all the time, so we kind of take a hit,” she said.

Even without early Black Friday sales, she had to make an adjustment long before the traditional start of holiday shopping.

“I’ve had people shopping as early as September for their Christmas shopping,” she said, “so I had to get my gift-wrap table set up early this year, which was was fine. Yeah, I’m noticing a lot of people are earlier … so I’m expecting to see slightly lower numbers for the (Black Friday) weekend because we had higher numbers weeks prior.”

Kristen Seymour owns two businesses within a block of each other in downtown Palisade:

• Harlow Lifestyle & Gift, 109 Third St., which she describes as “more of our general and unique gifts, more of your standard gift shop.”
• And West Slope Mercantile at 237 Main St. is “more of a Colorado lifestyle, outdoorsy store with clothing, souvenirs, outdoorsy things,” she said.

Like Wagner, Seymour is not one to offer sales at her small stores, but this year she’s relenting and offering 20 percent off during the month of December in each store.

“We do put Christmas out earlier,” she added. “Because Hobby Lobby does, we kind of have to.”

Seymour anticipates a “busier than normal” couple weeks at her stores, but her early start on reaching holiday shoppers took place in other venues. She went to several of Palisade’s plentiful wineries – Carboy Winery at Mt. Garfield Estate; Sauvage Spectrum; and The Ordinary Fellow – and set up “pop-ups” to display and sell items from her stores.

Seymour also set up shop at a Boozy Book Fair, a throwback to 1980s and ‘90s book fairs, hosted by The Ordinary Fellow.

Enstrom Candies, 701 Colorado Ave. in Grand Junction, doesn’t have to be so creative. The confectioner has been in business since 1960 and claims to make “the world’s finest almond toffee.” With the esteemed reputation it has earned, Enstrom Candies generally doesn’t have promotions for Black Friday, Small Business Saturday or Cyber Monday, according to co-owner Jim Simons.

Enstrom Candies has become well-versed at adjusting to shorter holiday-shopping seasons. As a result, it doesn’t see much difference in revenue. 

Simons wrote in an email interview, adding, “We know that we will have to process and ship the same amount of candy in a shorter period, meaning that we need more help in both customer service to take the orders and in the mail room to get this accomplished.”

If Enstrom Candies has to hire more people for the warehouse in order to ship more packages per day during the short season, that’s what it will do, Simons wrote.

While Enstrom Candies ships its products around the nation, it also sells plenty in its stores in Grand Junction, Montrose and the Denver area.

Seymour said she is “seeing a lot of chatter online about shopping local,” and she hopes those people are true to their words.

Wagner’s experience suggests they will be. She said Black Friday isn’t what it was 10, 15, 20 years ago, but she has seen a pleasant change emerge from the upheaval of holiday-shopping tradition. “I have noticed, just in the last four years or so, there is definitely a mindset for Small Business Saturday,” she said. “There’s a lot of people that are like, ‘I’m only gonna shop local,’ and, ‘I wanna support local.’ … They’re either doing all local or handmade stuff and things like that, which is really kind of nice, because it’s more what the season, to me, should be about.”