“I thought it would be a lot worse,” Currie said, as she sat on the floor surrounded by her children, including 14-year-old Drake Pascoe, who unwrapped new basketball sneakers, off-white Nikes with the familiar black swoosh.
Although some stores saw less foot traffic, customers waited in lines out the door at shops including Build-A-Bear Workshop and the LEGO Store. A long check-out queue at Barnes & Noble snaked around the front of the store.
Black Friday data showed the season might be uneven across retailers and shopping centers. Even with Target’s traffic on Black Friday up 17%, it has struggled to compete with Walmart, which has snatched more and more of Target’s core high-income shoppers. After Target missed its sales and earnings expectations during its last quarter, Target said it expected sales for the fourth quarter to be flat compared with last year and announced it was lowering its financial outlook for the rest of the year.
Macy’s, Nordstrom and Kohl’s all predicted flat to low single-digit growth for the season in their last earnings reports. But mall operators have pointed to legacy brands like Gap and Abercrombie & Fitch drawing more traffic this year.
Indoor malls saw 6.4% growth year over year for November, including 5% over Thanksgiving weekend and 8.2% on Black Friday itself, according to research firm Placer.ai.
Traffic at both Mall of America, the country’s largest indoor mall, and Southdale Center, the country’s oldest one, were on the high end of the averages, according to their operators.