While some stores in Siloam Springs were packed full of people for Black Friday, other local shop owners saw smaller crowds than usual.
Outside of big, national stores like Walmart, Black Friday in Siloam Springs isn't very black for some store owners.
Jepson Drug had few customers at times on Friday morning. Angela Jones, a cashier at the drug store, said that the morning had been quiet because most shoppers were in Fayetteville or Rogers.
"We're dead on Black Friday," she said. Jepson is busier as it gets closer to Christmas, Jones said.
Mike Saegert, president of G&S shoes, said that he still gets business on the nation's biggest shopping day, but his focus is on a different part of the week.
"We do our big push the Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday before," he said. "We do probably a month's worth of sales in those three days."
But Friday was a different story. Though G&S was still running a Black Friday special, he said the store was pretty quiet all morning.
One reason for the slow day was his location, he said. The shoe store is on the road that connects downtown Siloam Springs and the Walmart on U.S. Highway 412. But on this shopping holiday, most drivers were taking the highway and skipping downtown.
"Simmons is closed, Sager Creek (Vegetable Co.) is closed," he said. "There's not a lot of traffic."
Saegert did say that he expected business to pick up a little bit as the day went on and people were done shopping at the bigger stores.
Niki Yelverton, store manager at Stage, also expected sales to pick up throughout the day.
Stage opened at 2 p.m. on Thanksgiving to get a head start on other sale events.
Yelverton said that this was the third time Stage had opened on Thanksgiving, and that the opening had gone well. The store stayed open until 1 a.m. and each employee at the store worked a shift to deal with the crowds.
There was still a substantial team working on Friday morning, as Yelverton said they were prepared in case large crowds showed up as the day went along.
A few customers milled about the aisles, and though some had chosen to skip early morning shopping, others had been out for awhile already.
Stephanie Jones, who was shopping at Stage, said that she had gotten up and gone to Fayetteville at 3 a.m. to do her holiday shopping. She said that the crowds had been bad.
"I still have some shopping left to do," she said.
Others, like the Dustin and Talena Keeler, had chosen to skip the lines and sleep in.
"We went to Walmart at 10 and still got what we wanted," Dustin said. "We figured that if there was something we were supposed to get, it would still be there."
This avoidance of the hectic early morning lines is coinciding with another trend in Black Friday shopping.
Siloam Springs Radio Shack owner Mike Hayes said that online shopping has bitten into his store's traffic.
"Today is a normal Friday," he said. "Couldn't even tell it was Black Friday."
Hayes and Kent Caudle, the store manager, said that people were moving away from the lines in stores and into their living rooms with coffee and a laptop to do their shopping.
Caudle said that as confidence in online delivery and item quality were going up and the number of sales offered online rose, Radio Shack has seen fewer people buying in person.
General News on 11/28/2015