Best Buy will open at 5 p.m. on Thanksgiving again this year, kicking off its annual Black Friday discount event, though it will offer some of the deals immediately, the consumer electronics retailer said Tuesday.
In another sign that retailers have pushed the holiday shopping bonanza as early as it can go—a phenomenon known as “Black Friday creep”—Best Buy (BBY) kept its 2015 Black Friday hours the same as last year, which was the earliest the consumer electronics stores ever opened for the sale. It follows recent moves by Target (TGT) and Macy’s (M), whose Thanksgiving hours will also remain unchanged this season.
Still, Best Buy and the others are bucking a trend set by a growing number of retailers who have decided against opening on Thanksgiving, including H&M, GameStop (GME), and Staples (SPLS). Outdoor gear retailer REI said it won’t even open on Black Friday itself this year, in an effort to let its employees enjoy the holiday.
Best Buy’s stores will stay open on Turkey Day until 1 a.m., when they will close for a few hours of restocking and sleeping before reopening at 8 a.m. on Black Friday. (Hours differ in three states whose laws prohibit stores from opening on Thanksgiving: Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Maine.)
Some “doorbuster” deals typically reserved for the holiday shopping event, however, are already available at Best Buy stores and online, the company said. These include a $125 discount on an iPad Air 2, and a $250 Best Buy gift card bonus if you purchase a Samsung Galaxy S6 smartphone under certain conditions. For the most part, though, the bigger deals—such as $700 off a Samsung 60-inch 4K Ultra HD Smart TV—won’t actually be available until Thanksgiving.
For more about what happens at Best Buy on Black Friday, read the profile of the company that appeared in Fortune’s November issue: “Meet the women who saved Best Buy.” Here is an excerpt:
No matter how much your family got on your nerves last Thanksgiving, Best Buy executives probably had a more stressful holiday than you did.
To ramp up for Black Friday, the electronics retailer’s stores opened at 5 p.m. on Thanksgiving, the earliest they had ever begun their doorbuster deals. Forgoing cranberry sauce and stuffing, some 40 execs made a foray out from their Richfield, Minn., headquarters to visit local stores (their own and the competition’s)—and were greeted with the subzero temperatures of one of the Twin Cities’ coldest Thanksgivings on record. Chats with chilly customers couldn’t answer their burning question: Will this season be a boom or a bust? And around 4 a.m. Friday morning, CEO Hubert Joly was jolted out of bed by a frantic call from Mary Lou Kelley, his relatively new head of e-commerce, telling him that the company’s website had gone down during an unexpected traffic surge.By the time the executives reconvened Black Friday evening, few had slept or eaten more than a slice of pizza. But as data rolled in from across the country, the mood perceptibly lifted. Like campaign workers watching election results, the team was getting good news, state by state—stores had been full, sales numbers were on track. The crowd was too cautious to celebrate, recalling disappointments of Christmases past. “You have to remember that nothing is over until the fat lady sings,” Joly says.
