A group of shoppers check sale items on display outside a store at Cross County Mall in Mattoon Friday morning. The mall continued the Black Friday tradition of early-morning opening hours for what's considered the first day of the holiday shopping season.
DAVE FOPAY, JOURNAL GAZETTE & TIMES-COURIER
Shoppers enter the Marshalls store at Cross County Mall in Mattoon Friday morning. Crowds were light when stores opened for Black Friday but mall representatives say they expect a good holiday shopping season with the addition of the store and other changes at the mall this year.
MATTOON — A different atmosphere and more concentrated store hours greeted Coles County shoppers for Black Friday.
While some stores have done away with the practice of opening on Thanksgiving Day, additions at one of the county's main retail hubs were there in time to beckon shoppers.
Cross County Mall in Mattoon saw the opening this week of a Marshalls department store and it's the first holiday shopping season for the Mattoon Rural King store to be located there.
Blake Pierce, real estate director for Rural King, which also owns the mall, said it was also beneficial that C&C Kettle Corn opened and the under-new-management McQuarter's Pub was ready before the holidays.
"We were pushing them all to get open," he said.
The Rural King store's move to the mall at the first of the year will be a "big boost," and was part of the company's "original drive" to increase mall traffic, Pierce also said.
But a line did form outside the JC Penney store before it opened Thursday afternoon. Pierce said a healthy shopping season's expected, based what he said was a double-digit increase in mall tenants' sales since Rural King opened there.
Store hours and shopper responses vary from year to year but there's no reason to expect the Black Friday phenomenon not to continue, according to Linda Simpson, an Eastern Illinois University human services professor who's studied Black Friday.
"There will always be a Black Friday," she said. "It's something to kick off the shopping season."
With technology leading the way with so many things these days, events such as Cyber Monday, said to be one of the biggest online shopping days, has changed things, Simpson noted.
But if use of a shopping site is heavy, it can be like waiting in long lines at a brick and mortar store, she also said.
"Sometimes sites are so bogged down with traffic, they either crash or customers are forced to wait to complete their transactions," she said.
Simpson said technology also has helped shoppers get price alerts and to see Black Friday promotions earlier than in the past.
Simpson conducted a study in 2010 and 2011, around the time of the "milestone" of when stores began opening in the early morning on Black Friday. Some stores started opening on Thanksgiving a few years later but now shopping hours "vary widely," she said.
There was some "backlash" with Thanksgiving hours and having employees work on the holiday, she said. Concerns also arose about fatigue for workers and shoppers with marathon overnight shopping hours, she added.
During the study, Simpson had some of her students observe Black Friday shopping behavior throughout the state. She said they never saw any instances of shopper aggression that's been reported in some locations.
PHOTOS: How Marshalls took shape at Cross County Mall in Mattoon
Construction progressing at Marshalls site at Mattoon mall
A group of shoppers check sale items on display outside a store at Cross County Mall in Mattoon Friday morning. The mall continued the Black Friday tradition of early-morning opening hours for what's considered the first day of the holiday shopping season.
Shoppers enter the Marshalls store at Cross County Mall in Mattoon Friday morning. Crowds were light when stores opened for Black Friday but mall representatives say they expect a good holiday shopping season with the addition of the store and other changes at the mall this year.