Courtesy of Nordstrom

Pete Nordstrom, president of merchandising, and Erik Nordstrom, president of stores, during a news conference in New York announcing the new store.

The Nordstrom Facebook fan page has been all aflutter on news that the department store chain is finally going to take a big bite of the Big Apple.

“It's about damn time,” wrote one New Yorker, on news Nordstrom will be opening its first Manhattan store in 2018.

It’s an usual display of retail love from hardened Manhattanites who are more inclined to start campaigns keeping retailers out of their backyards, most recently Wal-Mart. 

But we’re talking about Nordstrom, the Seattle-based chain known for its insanely exhaustive shoe department and insanely attentive sales people.

“These people are the best operators in the affordable luxury department store business,” said Howard Davidowitz, chairman of Davidowitz & Associates, a retail consultancy and investment-banking firm headquartered in New York.

New Yorkers have been clamoring for a Nordstrom for years, said company spokeswoman Brooke White. And the decision to finally set the wheels in motion has been 15 years in the making, she said, adding, “It was quite a complicated process to find an ideal space.”

Nordstrom has already dipped its little toe in the New York market, operating a Faconnable boutique in the city until it sold the unit in 2007. It also opened a discount shoe outlet called Rack in 2010 in Union Square, and a charitable retail operation known as Treasure & Bond in Soho last year. “It was a way to give back and also a way to learn about serving New Yorkers,” White said.

With its new location, the retailer is now going all in, hiring at least 1,000 workers in 2018. The new store will be located on a 40,000-square-foot site on 57th Street, between Broadway and Seventh Avenue, in a location that once housed the original Hard Rock Cafe.

“It makes perfect sense that Nordstrom – one of the premier names in retailing – would want a flagship store in New York, the world's premier city for retailing,” said New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg in a statement. “This is very exciting news for New Yorkers and the millions of tourists who come to our city to shop each year.”

But not everyone is happy.

“Everybody will start to worry and raise their game,” said Davidowitz, referring to the department stores in the city, including Saks and Bloomingdale's, which he said have become complacent in recent years because there hasn’t been a new large competitor for a long time.

“Bloomingdale’s is going to say, ‘holy @!$%#, we better get our service better'," he said. "'We better raise our game because a giant has arrived in town.’”

Bloomingdale's is owned by Macy's Inc. The retailer's CEO Terry Lundgren did not immediately return a request for comment.

It's bad news for other retailers in the area, Davidowitz said, but great news for consumers who have seen chains such as Bonwit Teller and B. Altman & Co. shutter and never replaced.

“I really think Nordstrom is going to go gangbusters,” he said. “New Yorkers are very discriminating and they know what’s good. Nordstrom is on the mark in fashion, service and aesthetics. They are just very good.”

And given that shoes are one of the hottest fashion sellers these days, he said, Nordstrom “is going to shake things up.”

Nordstrom started out as a shoe retailer, tracing its first shoe shop in downtown Seattle back to 1901. Shoe merchants nationwide came to see Nordstrom as a model of how to sell shoes the right way, with over-the-top service and few promotions.

So what will Nordstrom’s Manhattan shoe connection be like? White said it’s too early to know exact dimensions but as with all of the retailer’s shoe havens, expect tens of thousands of pairs to choose from.

There will be five shoe departments, including women’s, active wear and juniors; designer, men’s and kids, she explained. And the store is going to stay true to its few-sales mantra with only three price blowouts yearly.

At $735 for an Oscar de la Renta satin pump at Nordstrom, there will probably be a lot of bargain-hunting New Yorkers waiting in line.

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Shoppers look for bargains at Toys "R" Us last year. The big-box chain is opening at 9 p.m. on Thanksgiving this year.

Call it Black Friday fatigue.

With stores racing to open ever earlier on Thanksgiving (Wal-Mart’s doors will open at 10 p.m.!), a backlash is growing, with some retailers and analysts questioning the madness.

“The lunacy of opening at 12 midnight or even earlier on Thanksgiving evening shows that this whole Black Friday thing has run out of legs,” said IDC Retail Insights program director Greg Girard. “Black Friday is a race to the bottom, and it’s just become another ad avenue.”

Other analysts think this year's extended hours are meant to distract shoppers from a lack of exciting inventory.

“If you build it, they will come,” said NPD Group chief industry analyst Marshal Cohen, “but they won’t come in the dead of night. To me, you’re not going to sell more product just because you’re open more hours. It’s more of a smoke screen than it is a solution to the issue.”

This year, some stores are choosing not to take extreme measures to lure in bargain-hungry customers as they kick off a season that is expected to bring in about $465.6 billion in sales, a modest 2.8 percent increase over last year.

Sears, for one, has decided to pass on the trend for midnight openings set by big-box retailers including Best Buy, Kohls and Target. Toys 'R' Us is opening at 9 p.m. Thanksgiving night, an hour ahead of Wal-Mart.

Last year, Sears chose to keep its doors open on Thanksgiving from 7 a.m. until noon, with the idea that shoppers would come in early to rack up a few deals and then head home to their families for a midday meal.

But while the company did have good numbers that day, “The customer feedback was very clear,” said Sears spokesman Tom Aiello. “The customers liked the deals, but they didn’t like the idea of Thanksgiving shorted as a holiday.”

So the chain will revert to its original plan to open at 4 a.m. on Friday. “I think there’s a group of customers that don’t aspire to get up in the middle of the night,” Aiello said.

Retail chain JC Penneyalso decided to stick with a 4 a.m. opening time this year so employees can spend Thanksgiving with friends and family, according to a company spokesman.

Employees at Target and Best Buy have launched petition drives on the website change.org protesting the early openings. “A midnight opening robs the hourly and in-store salary workers of time off with their families on Thanksgiving Day,” wrote petition creator Anthony Hardwick, who identifies himself as a Target employee.

Some local retailers are still undecided on their Black Friday hours and will make last-minute decisions, according to Cohen.

Others are resisting the bonanza that is Black Friday altogether—or at least, they engage in more subtlety. Seattle-based retail chain Nordstrom has avoided opening its doors on Thanksgiving throughout the company’s history and in recent years has posted signs in its stores that read, “One holiday at a time.”

Nordstrom waits until the morning of Black Friday to unveil its Christmas decorations, though it will open doors early that morning in some locations.

“It’s not as in your face,” said Forrester vice president and senior analyst Sucharita Mulpuru, “but there’s a reason that Thanksgiving weekend that people work longer hours and [the stores] pull out all the stops as far as offering sales and promotions—because that’s the nature of that weekend.”

Analyst Greg Girard of IDC said Black Friday is virtually absent from the websites of brand-oriented stores like Gap, Nordstrom and Lord & Taylor.

"And they’re doing something much more surgical in that they’re moving towards direct communications, like text messaging to consumers," he said. "They’re getting to consumers with whom they have a longer lifetime relationship."

Nordstrom, like many higher-end stores, doesn’t rely as heavily on Black Friday to make or break its sales year. Black Friday “is among our most high volume days. But it isn’t our largest sales day of the year, unlike many retailers,” said Nordstrom spokesman Colin Johnson.