Tag: thanksgiving

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)
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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You don’t need a plastic bag to cook a turkey

Every once in a while, there is advice that sounds good, but you just shouldn’t take it.

I ran into this situation on Thanksgiving when I decided to take the advice of others and use one of those plastic roaster bags in my straight-out-of-the-box roaster to help avoid cleaning up baked-in turkey juices.

It sounded like a great idea. We use similar bags all the time when cooking with a crock pot and they work like a dream. So, in an effort to avoid cleaning the contraption, I decided to use a roaster bag for the first time. We had picked up a couple for next to nothing about a week earlier and, like a fool, I assumed they worked just the same as my crock pot bags. You know, put them in the roaster, set the temperature, place the food in there, walk away and wait for that delicious smell of turkey to waft through the house.

But, because of my foolishness (or stupidity, depending on how you look at it), things didn’t go as planned.

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

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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