ST. CLAIRSVILLE — The Ohio Valley Mall and smaller, local vendors are striving to make shopping safe, convenient and enjoyable for Black Friday and the entire holiday shopping season.

Hosting “doorbuster” sales and attracting throngs of people for a single day of hunting for those post-Thanksgiving deals is not recommended during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. So, retailers are adapting and spreading out their offerings of Christmas gift bargains.

Lorilee Broderson, marketing and events administrator at the St. Clairsville Area Chamber of Commerce, also reminds shoppers to support smaller, locally owned stores during Black Friday and Small Business Saturday this weekend.

“We will be having craft vendors (Friday and Saturday). They will all be outside and they will all be masked — everybody socially distant, everybody at least 6 feet apart, all their tables, so that people can shop local and promote our businesses downtown,” she said.

“We’re trying to help people stay local and shop local and keep all our money right here in the Ohio Valley. We have 16 vendors in addition to our normal shop vendors that we have downtown, our normal boutiques,” she said. “There will be food trucks.”

“Everyone is very excited to have something to attract folks downtown,” she said.

At the Ohio Valley Mall, spokeswoman Candi Noble-Greathouse said the mall and its stores are making allowances for the COVID-19 pandemic. There will be no big events such as balloon drops, and Black Friday sales started early.

“We definitely are hoping for a nice turnout for holiday shopping, as well as the fact that many of our stores are extending offers to make it easier for shoppers to social distance and to take advantage of the specials,” she said.

“Our stores have started a lot of their Black Friday deals, and they’ll have some special ones over the weekend,” she said, adding that other types of specials also are being offered. “For four weeks we have a different gift with purchase, so we’ll have a different item that they could get for spending at the mall. They present their receipt at customer service.”

Promotional gifts for shoppers include plates, bath sets, pet toys and cook books.

“We have lots of fun things planned each week,” she said.

A disc jockey will be performing from 6 a.m. until 10 a.m. Friday to entertain early bird shoppers.

“Many stores have upped their stock and offered different items to make them available for long periods of time,” she said.

Joe Bell, spokesman for the mall’s parent Cafaro Co., said everyone is making adjustments.

“It’s going to be a different-looking holiday season, that’s for sure,” Bell said. “Industrywide, both shopping center owners as well as retailers knew they would have to make some changes in the way they do business. You’re going to see Black Friday. No doorbuster specials, no big crowds jammed shoulder-to-shoulder.

“The retailers made decisions earlier on to spread their promotions and sales through the entire holiday season,” he continued. “Some of them began (in) October. … We’ll see that up to Christmas Eve.

Bell said the mall’s owners are cognizant of retailers’ needs in terms of staffing and hours of operation.

“We as shopping center owners opted to do the same as what retailers had opted to do, which was not to do Thanksgiving hours and scale back those long holiday hours,” he added. “We just don’t need to have the same number of people out there for as many hours as in the past.

“We’re hoping there is still a demand for people to do their holiday shopping. The National Retail Federation and the International Council of Shopping has done some number crunching, and they believe what we’re going to see is a modest increase, perhaps 1 to 3 percent, according to who you’re talking to, of actual spending,” he said. “Some people are not in a position to spend more.”

He noted that there are positive signs for retail heading into 2021.

“There’s hopeful news on the horizon about several vaccines,” he said. “We’re seeing a variety of folks who are starting to make their way back to the economic mainstream, so we’re very hopeful that things are looking up pretty soon.”