Back to Basics Christian Bookstore in the St. Louis area has found it challenging to draw store traffic in the wake of the Michael Brown case in nearby Ferguson, Missouri.

Cynthia Davis told her fellow retailers on Facebook that she invited her family to park in the front of the store on Thanksgiving.

“It felt good to see the parking lot full,” Davis said ahead of Black Friday.

“Things have been horribly quiet since the Ferguson riots,” she said. “We are about 20 miles away [in O’Fallon, Missouri], but my customers are still freaked out by it. Nothing like a little rioting to keep people away from brick and mortar.”

Davis also saw protesters near her store.

“On Friday and Saturday [after Thanksgiving], we heard the protesters were at the Walmart across the street,” she said. “They were not right in front of my store, but close enough to scare some customers away.”

Family Christian Stores has several locationsin the area, but the chain was not affected by the protests.

“While Family Christian has not incurred any physical damage to our stores, our hearts are broken for the Ferguson community,” said Steve Johnson, senior marketing manager for the chain “Our prayer is for God to bring His healing.”

Concordia Publishing House has been in St. Louis for 145 years. Although the business has not been affected, Tim Agnew, Concordia’s director of graphic design at Concordia, has lived in Ferguson for 30 years and has blogged about the situation at inpraise.net.

The diverse city of Ferguson is “not rife with racial tension” in normal times, said Agnew, who stayed home the day after it was announced that Darren Wilson, the police officer who killed Brown while on duty, would not be indicted.

“The next morning I helped clean up because I needed to channel some negative energy into something positive,” Agnew told Christian Retailing.

“My wife and I have both gone down and at times even just talked to the protesters. … The peaceful ones are greatly in the majority,” he said. “The mood does change at night sometimes and especially [on] the weekends.”

“I’m hopeful that maybe some dialogue will come out of this eventually and there will be some healing,” said Agnew. But he added, “It hasn’t happened yet.”

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