Putting your best foot forward is key to successful marketing in any industry—but it’s particularly so in the footwear category.

If you’ve made it this far, we have good (maybe bad?) news: that will not be the last of our shoe puns in this blog. Proceed with glee if groan-worthy jokes are right up your alley.

This Friday, millions of people will be shopping. And millions of people won’t.

Every year, it seems more “conscious consumers” opt out of Black Friday and into the Small Business Saturday/Shop Local movement, started by American Express in barely post-recession 2010 to keep Main Street alive. Almost a decade later, the movement has proven its value: a recent survey found that among consumers who plan to shop on Small Business Saturday, 96% said the event “inspires them to go to small, independently owned retailers or restaurants that they have not been to before or would not have otherwise tried.”

Folks, Black Friday has arrived.

We’re going to assume you aren’t frantically checking your phone or your calendar to confirm, because if you’re like most shoppers in the United States, you’ve started holiday shopping already. Some of them—an increasing number, we might add—began the journey this summer, with a little something we know as Amazon Prime Day.