Shopping – Dustin Monke

After a year of plenty, Dickinson’s independent retail businesses prepare for more normal year-end sales

Out of Town owner and manager Brooke Leno, left, helps employee Chloe Jazvic as she helps a customer and Melissa Moos folds clothing on Friday, Nov. 29, 2015, at the store in the Prairie Hills Mall in Dickinson, N.D. (Dustin Monke / The Dickinson Press)

Holidays can make or break the profit margins of small retail businesses.

In Dickinson, the time carries even greater meaning for relatively new businesses — especially those that sprang up in recent years around the promise of the burgeoning energy industry and population growth, only to see commerce wane in the wake of the industry’s slowdown.

“In general, business is slower,” said Brooke Leno, manager of Out of Town and Out of Town Kids in the Prairie Hills Mall. “People aren’t coming in and dropping a bunch of money like they used to. They’re being more strategic about their purchases. It’s nothing that’s going to make or break us. It’s definitely slower and you can tell. But it seems like the last few days, people are getting into that Christmas shopping.”

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Love it or hate it, Black Friday brings ’em out

On Thanksgiving night — or Gray Thursday, if you want to call it that — crowds of shoppers gathered inside of Walmart awaiting the proverbial 6 p.m. starting bell that allowed them to buy discounted items such as TVs, iPads, video games, vacuums and even Tupperware.

Yes, Tupperware. But to be fair, at less than $7 for 30 items, any 1950s housewife will tell you it was a steal of a deal. And any 2013 gamer will say you’re crazy if you’re not in line for $30 copies of Call of Duty or Grand Theft Auto V.

Love it or hate it, Thanksgiving and Black Friday sales sure do have a way of bringing out customers.

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Shoppers Holiday: Dickinson store owners, managers prepare for Thanksgiving, Black Friday rush

1128 Black Friday 1 — Sara Spradley puts a tool set on a rack at Newby’s Ace Hardware on Wednesday in preparation for the store’s early morning opening on Friday.

Lenny Johnson calls the sound similar to a “stampede of horses.”

The co-owner of Starboard, an apparel store in the Prairie Hills Mall, has been a part of three Black Friday doorbuster sales pushes. Each one has been more interesting than the last, he said, as the mall doors open and customers flood in — some of them running — toward stores looking for deals.

“It is absolutely the craziest thing you will ever see,” Johnson said. “You can literally hear the feet.”

Dickinson’s population has practically doubled in the past five years and many who work in retail businesses said sales have improved during that span.

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