A store's fourth quarter, week by week, to Super Saturday

NRF’s Halloween survey came out on Tuesday, and one line in it matters to every shop owner reading this: 49% of consumers said they planned to start Halloween shopping in September or earlier, up from 34% in 2016. The fourth quarter no longer starts in November. For a lot of your customers, it started this week.

The Census Bureau’s 2025 monthly figures show how much rides on the next three months. Hobby, toy and game stores did 27.0% of their year in November and December alone. Clothing stores did 12.4% of theirs in December. Gift, novelty and souvenir stores have their single biggest month in October, at 12.5%. Here is the quarter as we plan it with shops, one stretch at a time.

Late September to mid October: Halloween and the gift shop peak

NRF expects Halloween spending to reach $13.5 billion this year, and 13% of shoppers plan to buy Halloween items at local and small businesses, almost double the 7% who said so in 2016. That is a door into the shop for people who do not normally come in.

This is also the stretch to finish the work that pays off for the rest of the year, while the shop is still manageable:

• Products on your Google profile, through the Local Inventory app if your till and barcodes qualify, or the product editor if they do not.
• Regular hours checked, and special hours entered now for every extended evening, Thanksgiving Day, the weekend after and Christmas Eve. Google’s guidelines provide special hours for holidays and events for exactly this.
• Photos of the shop as it looks this season, not last spring.

Halloween falls on a Saturday this year. If you are staying open later that day, or closing early for the neighborhood trick-or-treat, put it on the profile the week before.

Mid to late October: the list and the gift guide

Every holiday email you send in November and December goes to the list you have on November 1. Push the sign-up at the counter hard for these weeks: email and text, with a plain reason to join, such as first look at the gift guide or the date of your late-night shopping event. Send only to people who opted in, and keep the list in your own system rather than a spreadsheet on the till computer.

Write the gift guide now. Group it by who the gift is for and by price band, photograph the actual items on your shelves, and link each to a product page if you sell online. It becomes the October email, the first November post and a printed card by the register.

Early November: the season officially opens

NRF defines the holiday season as November 1 through December 31, and last year’s ran well: 2025 holiday sales grew 4.1% according to the CNBC and NRF Retail Monitor. But the definition trails behavior. By the end of Thanksgiving weekend 2025, 84% of consumers had already begun their holiday shopping, with 53% of it still to do.

So the first week of November is for the gift guide email, a steady rhythm on Facebook and Instagram, and any Meta budget you plan to spend. WordStream by LocaliQ’s Facebook ads benchmarks, published this month, put traffic campaigns in “Shopping, Collectibles & Gifts” at a median of $0.59 per click and a 1.88% click-through rate, for campaigns from April 2025 to June 2026. Cheap clicks, best spent on people who already know you.

Thanksgiving weekend: November 26 to 29

Last year NRF counted a record 202.9 million people shopping over Thanksgiving weekend. In stores, 129.5 million shopped, up 3% from 126 million in 2024, against 134.9 million online. The Sunday after Thanksgiving drew a record 32.6 million in-store shoppers.

In our experience, that Sunday is the day independent shops most often leave closed or short-staffed. If your street has foot traffic that weekend, consider opening, and say so on your profile.

Small Business Saturday: November 28

The Saturday after Thanksgiving belongs to you. NRF expected 67 million shoppers on last year’s date, and 80% said they were considering shopping specifically to support local businesses and the day itself. Those shoppers did not come for the lowest price in town. They came to spend with someone they know.

Three weeks ahead, check whether you appear on the American Express Shop Small Map, which American Express says features only qualifying Card-accepting merchants, and order its free Shop Small materials for the window. Two weeks ahead, email your list with what is happening in the shop that day: a maker visit, a gift wrap table, the owner on the floor. On the day, keep the sign-up sheet at the till. Many of those shoppers are first-timers, and the list is how they come back before Christmas.

December: three Saturdays and the last one before Christmas

December is the biggest month for most kinds of store. As of early December last year, NRF found consumers had finished only 51% of their holiday shopping on average, and it expected 159 million people to shop on Super Saturday, the last Saturday before Christmas. This year that is December 19.

The work in December is maintenance, not invention:

• Keep stock current on Google so a shopper who sees an item listed finds it on the shelf.
• Reply to every new review within a day or two; holiday reviews are the ones next year’s shoppers will read first.
• One email a week to the list, ending with a last-call message before your final day for gift wrapping or shipping.
• Special hours checked again before Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve.

After Christmas: the gift cards come back

Gift cards sold in December come back in January, and in our experience that is when a first-time holiday shopper decides whether you are a regular. Thank-you emails to everyone who bought, a January event for gift card holders and a review request to December’s new customers turn one visit into the second.

What to do this month

• Enter special hours on your Google profile for every date you will open late or close early through New Year’s Day.
• Get your barcoded stock onto Google through the Local Inventory app, or start the product editor with your top sellers.
• Put the email and text sign-up at the counter today, with a reason to join that is about your shop.
• Draft the gift guide and photograph the items on your own shelves.
• Mark November 28 and December 19 on the staff calendar, and decide now whether you will open on November 29.

Most of a store’s year is decided in these thirteen weeks, and most of the deciding happens before Halloween. The list work above is what our GoHighLevel builds handle, the hours and stock are part of our Google Business Profile work, and the rest of the store calendar is on our page for independent retail stores.