I just returned from a six-hour Black Friday mall tour at a large, busy and successful mall in Central Ohio. Took my niece shopping as a birthday gift, we were there from 3pm-9pm or so. Mall was packed to the gills, even that late on Black Friday. Parked outside of Macy's and had to cut through the store to get to the mall (we returned to Macy's later in the day), the place was PACKED and navigating through the store was a pain in the arse, frankly, as there were many people packed in, shopping. Bath and Body Works? Crazy. Twelve or more registers, all with long (but fast-moving) lines. Individual stores like Hollister, Pink, etc. all bustling. JCPenney? Not so much. Not a huge crowd, but moderately populated with shoppers. Sears? I had to cut through Sears to get outside for a little smoke break - it was like a ghost town. I saw maybe 15 or so people during my first-floor cut through, it was an absolute ghost town compared with the rest of the mall. I feel like the writing is on the wall for Sears, this will probably be the last Black Friday we see with a physical Sears involved. I read that the CEO had chosen to not invest in store upkeep and modernization, and it shows. Who wants to shop there, even online? The idea of doing so is depressing somehow, sorry to say. Wishing good things for the current employees, I hope they can emerge from this relatively unscathed. As for KMart? You couldn't pay me to visit one of those stores, haven't been in decades. Target is it for me, they seem to carry higher-quality merch at reasonable prices and Target is actually a fun place to shop!
Found this post on another thread as a reply. I don’t want to rub the salt into the wounds of anybody on this board, but @WiWG14m-hht gave a realistic display of how Black Friday sales looked like in most of the stores.