Visiting family in Bend for the week, Dione Tamura of Petaluma, California, did some shopping in the Old Mill District on Tuesday, but she said she “absolutely” will not set foot in a store on Thanksgiving.

“I never do,” she said. “I always think of it as a family time.”

Tamura thinks retailers should give their employees time off to do the same.

She remembered the year her son was working at an outlet mall and missed Thanksgiving dinner because he had to be awake “at some ungodly hour” to report for Black Friday duty.

“And there were people willing to shop in the middle of the night,” she said.

Perhaps it’s because of negative views of Thanksgiving Day openings that more retail chains are staying closed — and publicizing that decision.

The website Bestblackfriday.com reports that 76 national and regional retail chains will stay closed Thursday. That’s up from 69 businesses last year and 59 in 2016, when the website first started tracking the closures.

Many big box stores, including Best Buy, Target and Walmart, continue to open on Thanksgiving. Bestblackfriday.com confirmed 34 store brands will be open on the holiday, down from 38 last year, but not much different from 2016, when 33 chains were open.

What has changed is retailers’ willingness to share information about whether they will be open or closed, said Eric Jones, co-owner of the site, which aggregates Black Friday sale fliers and collects a commission from some retailers.

“Now more and more retailers who are choosing to close on Thanksgiving are voluntarily coming to us and asking to be placed on our stores closed list,” Jones said. “It’s much harder for us to get stores to admit they will open.”

The website usually adds stores to its “open” list only after a Black Friday ad is released with the store opening dates, or if the company has issued a press release, Jones said.

Bestblackfriday.com has run online surveys of consumer sentiment around Thanksgiving openings.

In the 2018 survey of 1,069 adults asking, “How do you feel about stores being open on Thanksgiving Day?” 47.66 percent said they either dislike or strongly dislike the trend, while 24.67 percent said they favored or strongly favored it.

Also shopping in Bend this week was Brandy Chapin of La Pine, who said she’s observed Black Friday evolve into a Thanksgiving tradition in her own family.

When Chapin, 26, was a teen, she and her sister would wait in line for the Black Friday sales.

Now her sister goes shopping with her grown children after Thanksgiving dinner while the rest of the family stays home, she said.

Chapin said her decision to sit out Thanksgiving shopping is more about avoiding crowds than strong feelings about stores opening on a national holiday.

“I think everyone deserves to be home with their family if they have it,” she said. “If they volunteer to work, that’s great.”