Merchants ready for holiday shopping

It’s Thanksgiving week - a time for turkey dinner, family vacation and the shopping extravaganza that is the start of the holiday shopping season.|

It’s Thanksgiving week - a time for turkey dinner, family vacation and the shopping extravaganza that is the start of the holiday shopping season.

For retailers, it’s the most hectic time of the year, as stores rush to stock inventory for the shopping hordes that will descend on Black Friday. And for some stores in Petaluma - mostly big-box retailers - all that craziness is starting earlier than ever.

Target’s Petaluma store will open at 6 p.m., a smidge earlier than last year’s 8 p.m. kickoff. Kohl’s will join Target in its 6 p.m. Thanksgiving opening, as will Petaluma’s Village Premium Outlets mall, which includes big retailers like Adidas, Banana Republic and Levi’s outlet store. All those retailers will stay open all night and into Black Friday.

Not all Petaluma retailers will be a part of the bigger-than-ever Black Friday frenzy, however. While many of the big-box retailers will open Thanksgiving Day, Petaluma’s smaller businesses are planning a calmer launch for the holiday shopping season.

Petaluma’s Downtown Association is promoting Small Business Saturday, a shopping holiday patented by credit giant American Express in 2010 to encourage shoppers to patronize independent shops. Petaluma’s small businesses are offering alternatives to people who would rather not battle it out for televisions or clothing after waiting in line at Target or Kohl’s.

Santa Claus will make his first appearance on Saturday at the River Plaza and will make subsequent appearances each weekend to attract families to the downtown, said Petaluma Downtown Association Executive Director Marie McCusker. The Downtown Association will hand out a calendar of events Saturday to let people know about things like the downtown open house on Dec. 6, where businesses will hand out cider to patrons, and which ones will be festooned for the season.

“We do everything we can to encourage people to shop locally,” McCusker explained. “We have a vibrant downtown - it’s a different experience to shop in a downtown like ours rather than shopping just to check off a list.”

For the most part, those merchants won’t be feeding into the Black Friday frenzy that is set to start on Thanksgiving Day.

Holly Wick, who owns Athletic Soles in downtown Petaluma, is calling her Friday shopping day “Bright Friday.”

“I don’t like the term, ‘Black Friday,’” Wick said, adding that she’s not interested in the frenzy of Black Friday. “I call it Bright Friday.”

She’ll close her store on Thanksgiving, encouraging her staff to stay home with their families on Thanksgiving. She herself will volunteer at Petaluma’s Thanksgiving run, an event that draws hundreds of people on the holiday.

The expected nice weather, Wick said, will probably draw more people to her store, though she warns of a typical conundrum, “If you have all staff on, it’ll be empty, and when you don’t, it will be packed.”

For her particular business, the pre-Christmas shopping season isn’t even the height of her yearly sales. January - the start of many people’s ambitious New Year’s resolutions to lose weight - is the busiest time for Athletic Soles.

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