Ah, college. A magical time in a young person’s life. College is where you study hard, party harder and, if you’re lucky, have time to pay the bills by working even harder than that. In my case, that meant working at a local big box tackle store, which leads us to this week’s investigation. Today, we’re taking a close look at the holiday beyond the holiday, the holiday of turkey sandwiches instead of turkey dinners: you know what it is, it’s been on your mind for weeks now…Black Friday.
A 50 foot wall of blue jeans stood before me. I remember it well. Sometime in the pre-dawn hours, the management and staff of a big box store that rhymes with Grass Snow Shops had arrived to put everything in place. Like ants in the jungle, we labored under box after box of folded denim. We labored so that lines of ravenous shoppers could break through the doors of our tiny civilization at sunrise, so they could take their fill of $5 pants and any number of other manic deals they could get their hands on. “I still have PTSD from it,” jokes fellow former Grass Snow associate Betsy Edwards.
She’s only half -joking. It was all in the name of Black Friday, but was it worth it?
I’ll never know. Grass Snow Shops is a privately held company that doesn’t release earning statements. And if they did, they likely wouldn’t worry themselves with telling the worker ants. But, hey, they did give us all a big, fat Thanksgiving turkey—and you should have seen my queen mother’s face when I came home with that sucker!
But recently, some retailers have started giving up on Black Friday. Megalithic outfitter REI has made headlines for spurning the day. They’re giving everyone the day off. REI will make no money on Black Friday, and they’re proud of it, too.
But what about the tackle industry? REI is an industry outlier. They sell fishing kayaks and some apparel, but that’s about it. What are real tackle stores, big and small, planning for Black Friday? Are any of them following REI’s lead? Let’s find out.
In Central Florida, Gary’s Tackle Box is throwing an epic fishing party. “It’s our biggest day of the year,” says Gary Simpson. “From the very first year we’ve been here, it’s been what we call our customer appreciation day. Everything in the store is on sale—10 percent minimum, and selected items are 20 and 30 percent off. We go to all of our suppliers and our direct accounts and ask them to help where they can, and my goodness they really did well this year.”
Gary says his store starts planning for Black Friday about two months in advance. In addition to sales, they’re catering food to feed their customers and bringing in top names in fishing like Shaw Grigsby, Bernie Schultz, Terry Scroggins and Peter Thliveros. Gary’s Tackle Box expects around 1,000 people to pass through their store on Friday.
On the Atlantic Coast, The Charleston Angler is offering 30 percent off of all in-store apparel, except for their own, logo-branded merchandise. “We treat Black Friday pretty much like every Friday,” says store owner Caroline Rhodes. We aren’t trying to do the door buster. We’re not a big department store.”
Rhodes says her store bumps up staff for Black Friday. “We expect a little more traffic than we typically get. It will be like summertime. More families come in that want to go shopping or go fishing together. We are prepared for that and have suggestions in the store for gifts. We make sure stocking stuffers are easy for people to find. Here, in South Carolina, the huge thing this weekend is the Clemson/Carolina game. It’s a 100-year rivalry, and if you’re a football fan that’s what you’re going to be doing. You’re not going to be shopping, so we plan what we are doing around an extended period of time.”
In the Pacific Northwest, Yeager’s Sporting Goods is largely shrugging the Black Friday tradition, and instead opting to promote their own, annual 12-hour sale on December 9. “Black Friday is not our biggest sales day,” says store manager John “Westy” Westerfield. “It’s a big day for us, it’s about number four, but our biggest day is going to be on December 9 when we are open for 12 hours, nine-to-nine. It’s crackers. We will do more business on that one day than we will on the next two or three best days of the year combined.”
The theory behind hosting their own promotion, Westerfield says, is simple:
“We’ve learned that when you open up that Thanksgiving Day newspaper and see five pounds of ads in there, and everybody is going crazy…all of these people are doing crazy stuff, we just don’t do it. We’re not going to have the advertising power to tell people not to stand in line at Walmart at midnight to get the $19.95 widget that’s supposed to sell for $59.95. We don’t want that kind of image for our store. We love our customers and we love our community. They know who we are. We tell them to go do all of that stuff and come see us when they’re done.”
From the looks of things, REI will remain in thin company among tackle dealers this Friday. In a way, that makes sense. The big box shopping experience is dramatically different from a visit to an independently owned shop; the bigger the store, the bigger the crowd. While strategies for Black Friday vary across the land, each has its merit: a party, a zag, or business as usual.
And each is, it seems, staying far away from a 50 foot wall of blue jeans. For me, and for Betsy Edwards, that’s one more thing to be thankful for this season.
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