Prepping for holiday shopping in downtown Helena

In the video above, Michael Wolff reports on businesses and shoppers in downtown Helena that are preparing for the holiday season.

Helena’s business and consumers are gearing up for the holiday shopping season. Many small businesses around the country rely on the holiday shopping season for the overall success of their businesses.

Abigail Dolan is a program manager for the Helena Downtown Business Improvement District (BID), she says that the BID is expecting a significant increase in foot and shopping traffic to the downtown area during the holiday shopping season.

“We expect a huge increase the November and December months are huge profitable months for downtown businesses. Most local businesses on the Gulch see a huge increase where they depend on those dollars being spent those months to get them through the slow months of January and February,” said Dolan.

This is indicative of national trends. According to a report by the National Retail Foundation (NRF), U.S. downtowns see a 20-50% increase in foot traffic during the holiday season compared to non-holiday shopping periods.

Lindsey Barnes is the owner and operator of General Mercantile in downtown Helena. She emphasized that her business relies on success during the holiday shopping period.

“In terms of my bank account I kind of cleared it out for November buying everything hoping that everybody will then buy it in return, so this is a huge season for us we are here for the community every day of the year, but we are seasonal when it comes to paying the bills, so this is big,” said Barnes.

Many Helena residents we spoke to on the downtown Helena walking mall shared that they do a bulk of their holiday shopping on N. Last Chance Gulch when they can.

Rick Tappan is a Helena resident and shared how he does his shopping, “We do a lot of shopping at Lasso the Moon for our kids we also hit up Golden Girls and lots of the thrift markets when we’re looking for things like bookcases or odds and ends. That you can’t find online. But a lot of the bread-and-butter stuff we typically get, we’ll just order through Amazon or other online retailers”.

Linda Michael, also from Helena, tries to do her holiday shopping exclusively through local businesses.

“I plan on doing most of my holiday shopping right here on the gulch and local selling fair-type things like there’s handmade Helena coming up and fair-trade market and those are great places to find gifts for the whole family,” says Michael.

Holiday shopping budgets did vary between Helena residents but generally were under the NRF’s expected record high holiday shopping spending average per person of $902.