Fireworks erupt over the former Bon Marché and Macy’s department store at Fourth Avenue and Pine Street during the downtown Seattle tree-lighting celebration on Friday. (Karen Ducey / The Seattle Times)
Nov. 30, 2024 at 6:00 am Updated Nov. 30, 2024 at 6:00 am
By Alex Halverson
Seattle Times business reporter
While more than 183 million Americans are expected to shop online or in person between Thanksgiving and Monday, Black Friday — the in-person retail phenomenon that once saw shoppers pack downtown Seattle — isn’t what it once was.
The National Retail Foundation said in a report earlier this week that a record number of people plan to shop throughout the holiday weekend, with Black Friday and Cyber Monday being the two most popular days.
In downtown Seattle, the retailers along Pine and Pike streets all splashed Black Friday sale posters across their front doors. But the lines of years past were gone.
Alongside the shoppers bouncing between Uniqlo, Nordstrom and Zara, crews around Westlake Center set up the enormous Christmas tree that sits in Westlake Park. The annual Friday evening tree lighting celebration signaled the launch of the holiday shopping season downtown.
Seattle’s retail scene has taken hits with major departures from Nike, The North Face and Saks OFF Fifth Avenue. The major shopping centers at Westlake Center and Pacific Place faced an exodus of smaller shops. Cyber Monday has also turned the end of November into an online sales bonanza.
Uniqlo, a new addition and bright spot in downtown Seattle, was even marketing an “early Black Friday” sale from Nov. 22 through Thanksgiving, before its actual Black Friday sale began.
Jim Wright, who was visiting Seattle from Los Angeles for the holiday weekend, said almost all of his shopping has shifted online. But as he walked up the hill out of Pike Place Market along Pike Street with a bag full of nuts and pottery, he said he liked to be among the crowd.
“We needed something to get out and do this morning so we shopped at the Market,” he said. “It felt good to see people shopping around us and talk to the sellers at all of the stands. They have these cool stories that you wouldn’t hear if you didn’t shop around here.”
Pike Place Market has recovered most of its weekly visitors since the COVID pandemic. The market, much enhanced in recent years, regularly records visitor traffic at 80% to 90% of prepandemic levels, according to cellphone-tracking data the Downtown Seattle Association gets from Placer.ai.
Sun shined on downtown as the temperature struggled to get past 40 degrees. While the market bustled with bundled-up shoppers, it was more of a mixed bag a few blocks to the east in the heart of the downtown shopping district.
Several buildings in downtown Seattle’s retail core have empty storefronts, even in areas where other retailers drew a constant stream of customers. Uniqlo, the Japanese retailer in the Macy’s building, was crowded Friday morning. Directly across the street was a vacated corner space that had the ghosts of the words “Abercrombie & Fitch” over the doors.
Nordstrom has both its flagship store and one of its discounted Rack stores along Pine Street, but the retailers that used to surround those stores have all departed over the past few years. All blamed a mix of issues including public safety concerns, financial difficulties at the corporate level and a severe drop in foot traffic since the pandemic.
In addition to Nike and The North Face, apparel companies like Vans and Himali have uprooted themselves from downtown. Crime has been an easy explanation, but the number of people downtown still doesn’t support a street scene built to serve prepandemic levels of local visitors and office workers.
Downtown Seattle has been able to recover most of the tourist traffic it lost during the pandemic, according to the downtown association, a city-supported trade group.
But the city has had a steep drop in local visitors, meaning those who live within a 10-mile radius of downtown, since the pandemic. In 2023, local visits overall were roughly 60% of 2019’s total.
The downtown association said it’s been better in 2024. Over the summer, between June and September, more than 2 million local visitors were in the Pike-Pine corridor, which stretches from First to Ninth avenues and Union to Stewart streets. That’s about 500,000 more visitors than in the same time frame in 2023.
“Local visitors not only contribute significantly to the economic health of small businesses, they foster a sense of community and identity,” the association said in a recent economic report. “Getting locals to return downtown is critical to the health of downtown arts organizations, retail establishments and restaurants.”
Mary Anderson, who’s lived in Seattle for more than 20 years, resides downtown and spent the morning shopping with her friend Ann Strickland. The two had plans to shop at Uniqlo for a specific item discounted 40%.
“Black Friday shopping is normally something I never do,” she said. “I was going to buy something from Uniqlo the other day but saw that it would be 40% off on Black Friday.”
But even though Anderson came for Uniqlo, she said she’d already been to the Rack and would “probably end up shopping around other places since I’m here. It’s a little bit of that shopping fever.”
