# Black Friday: is there a cure? **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [November 15, 2014, 5:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/black-friday-is-there-a-cure/704701 "2014-11-15T17:00:05Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![PlainJain](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/5daacb/32.png) [@PlainJain](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/PlainJain)\ **Post date:** [November 15, 2014, 9:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/black-friday-is-there-a-cure/704701/21 "2014-11-15T21:14:17Z")
> [@Smapti](#): > > Stop shopping on Friday. > > Problem solved. Hmm. How would that work though? So let’s say I get up to go shopping on Friday. What do I do next? ---
**Author:** ![Amateur\_Barbarian](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/59ef9b/32.png) [@Amateur\_Barbarian](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Amateur_Barbarian)\ **Post date:** [November 15, 2014, 9:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/black-friday-is-there-a-cure/704701/22 "2014-11-15T21:25:00Z")
> [@hajario](#): > > Yes but the OP’s family is directly affected since they have to move their celebration in order to accommodate one daughter’s work schedule. > [@Chronos](#): > > It’s understood when you take a job in retail that you’re going to have to work on the biggest retail day of the year. If that’s not acceptable to you, don’t take a retail job. And if you (or a loved one) don’t have a retail job, there’s nothing at all stopping you from ignoring Black Friday. This is really a side issue - I am not in any way bothered that my daughter has to work on Black Friday, and that it means around 48 hours of insane scheduling for her. As you put it, to expect anything else for a front-line retail worker is pretty unrealistic. (No, I don’t like it… but neither am I wailing that it’s unfair or exceptional in our case or anyone else’s.) It’s the rollback well into the traditional Thanksgiving dinner hour that bothers me, as much because it will impact hundreds of thousands or millions of such dinners, not just ours. And ONLY to further the meaningless madness of “Black Friday.” I question whether the whole BF/SBS/CM phenomenon results in a dime’s more revenue any more, anyway - like AdBuster’s stupid “Buy Nothing Day,” it assumes that those sales are going to be unique and exceptional… instead of just doing the buying some other day[s] of the shopping season. So the rollback is a nonsensical attempt to keep frogleaping backwards and outmaneuver… someone. It would be merely eyeroll material had it not crossed this line into actually impacting the national Thanksgiving celebration. An inverted analogy would be if the feds were to declare the Christmas holiday over at 10:00 am on the 25th and make everyone report to work. > [@Justin\_Bailey](#): > > The only difference today is that it’s encroaching on Thanksgiving Day too. That is - IMVHO - a huge difference; game-changing. Life-changing. Another few years and it may be far more difficult to “just ignore it.” ---
**Author:** ![Smapti](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/smapti/32/17938_2.png) [@Smapti](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Smapti)\ **Post date:** [November 15, 2014, 9:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/black-friday-is-there-a-cure/704701/23 "2014-11-15T21:28:55Z")
> [@monstro](#): > > I have a friend who’s wife is an ER doctor. She has to work on Thanksgiving. > > So does my brother, the truck driver. > > I will be surfing the web and watching TV sometime during Thanksgiving. Are robots running those things, or are people? I’m thinking it’s people. > > Lots of folks work on Thanksgiving and no one cares about them. Why should the Walmart cashier who WANTS holiday pay be fretted over, but not anyone else? I’m lucky enough to work in a job where my contract says I get a full day’s pay for Thanksgiving whether I work it or not, plus time-and-a-half on top of that for any hours I do work on the day itself. Perhaps if more employers had to adhere to terms like that, they’d think twice about dragging their minimum-wage-slaves away from their families at 6 PM. ---
**Author:** ![monstro](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/ba9def/32.png) [@monstro](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/monstro)\ **Post date:** [November 15, 2014, 9:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/black-friday-is-there-a-cure/704701/24 "2014-11-15T21:33:13Z")
> [@Amateur Barbarian](#): > > Fuck all this family, feel-good shit, y’know? Gobble that last bite of pie and get your ass shopping. No one in my family does the shopping thing on Thanksgiving, as far as I know. Nor do we do the Black Friday madness. But we don’t stay cloistered on Black Friday either. We usually go out to lunch and then to the movies. Depending on where the movies are, we might venture into a store and browse and comment on the crazy-long lines. So we spend money on Black Friday. We are part of the dreaded “retail crowd”. We just aren’t stampeding into Walmart and camping out at Best Buy. And I’d argue that because we’re doing it together, as a family, it counts as “family, feel-good shit” just as much as staying at home and roasting marshmellows. Is spending money at all on Thanksgiving and Black Friday abhorrent to you? Or is your beef against certain kinds of businesses? ---
**Author:** ![Amateur\_Barbarian](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/59ef9b/32.png) [@Amateur\_Barbarian](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Amateur_Barbarian)\ **Post date:** [November 15, 2014, 9:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/black-friday-is-there-a-cure/704701/25 "2014-11-15T21:56:51Z")
> [@monstro](#): > > Is spending money at all on Thanksgiving and Black Friday abhorrent to you? Or is your beef against certain kinds of businesses? I don’t have any problem with individual choice about spending money, on these two days or any other. The problem is that it’s not really individual choice; it’s a calculated, fostered and driven effort to get people to put shopping ahead of other considerations. It’s a superheated form of spend-first, think later, and it’s for a class of spending that is highly questionable even if not used as a sledgehammer to ruin a national, family-centric holiday of little other value to retailers. The problem is THEIRS - it’s that we DON’T spend money on that day, and they’ve essentially escalated things to the nuclear option to solve the problem. We lose… and it’s not even clear that they actually win anything. (It occurs to me that you might have conflated my comments with the general sweep of misdirected ranting by folks like AdBusters. Not the same at all.) ---
**Author:** ![hajario](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/hajario/32/171_2.png) [@hajario](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/hajario)\ **Post date:** [November 15, 2014, 10:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/black-friday-is-there-a-cure/704701/26 "2014-11-15T22:28:45Z")
> [@monstro](#): > > I have a friend who’s wife is an ER doctor. She has to work on Thanksgiving. > > So does my brother, the truck driver. > > I will be surfing the web and watching TV sometime during Thanksgiving. Are robots running those things, or are people? I’m thinking it’s people. > > Lots of folks work on Thanksgiving and no one cares about them. Why should the Walmart cashier who WANTS holiday pay be fretted over, but not anyone else? That’s a good point. I don’t really feel very strongly about the issue either way. One of my friends is all over boycotting any business that is open on TG. If I worked for Walmart, I’d be pissed off that someone who doesn’t know me was trying to take away a day’s pay from me. ---
**Author:** ![erysichthon](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/d07c76/32.png) [@erysichthon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/erysichthon)\ **Post date:** [November 15, 2014, 10:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/black-friday-is-there-a-cure/704701/27 "2014-11-15T22:48:38Z")
> [@monstro](#): > > I have a friend who’s wife is an ER doctor. She has to work on Thanksgiving. > > So does my brother, the truck driver. > > I will be surfing the web and watching TV sometime during Thanksgiving. Are robots running those things, or are people? I’m thinking it’s people. > > Lots of folks work on Thanksgiving and no one cares about them. Why should the Walmart cashier who WANTS holiday pay be fretted over, but not anyone else? THIS. I hear this stuff every single year. I get that people are sick of the Black Friday frenzy and the rampant holiday consumerism; fine. But that talk always seems to segue into a demand that the _whole fucking universe_ close down on Thanksgiving and Christmas so that people can “be with their families.” The holiday-shutdown crowd will grudgingly concede that _mayyybe_ police, fire, and hospital personnel should work, but absolutely everyone else should get the day off, no exceptions. I saw a lot of this on Facebook last year, during the uproar over the discovery that OMG OMG OMG [Pizza Hut is open on Thanksgiving](http://finance.yahoo.com/news/pizza-hut-manager-says-fired-042328900.html). I always wonder if those people watch football on TV on holidays. Do they not realize that stadiums have employees? What about hotels; should they kick out all of their guests for 24 hours? Should airlines stop flying that day? Should prisons give all their inmates 24 hours release time so the guards can get the day off? Hell, let’s shut down the electrical grid too. Power plant employees need to be with their families! I also find it irritating that people assume that everyone lurrrves holidays, or that everyone has families to be with. Hell, maybe some people don’t want to be with their families because everyone ends up drunk and arguing. Yeah, Black Friday sucks and I wouldn’t dream of going near a big-box store that day. But I find this compulsory “you _must_ spend the day with your family” shit just as obnoxious. ---
**Author:** ![Justin\_Bailey](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/justin_bailey/32/8792_2.png) [@Justin\_Bailey](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Justin_Bailey)\ **Post date:** [November 15, 2014, 10:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/black-friday-is-there-a-cure/704701/28 "2014-11-15T22:50:54Z")
> [@Amateur\_Barbarian](#): > > The problem is that it’s not really individual choice; it’s a calculated, fostered and driven effort to get people to put shopping ahead of other considerations. It’s a superheated form of spend-first, think later, and it’s for a class of spending that is highly questionable even if not used as a sledgehammer to ruin a national, family-centric holiday of little other value to retailers. But people have free will. The amount of people who camp out and cause a ruckus are a very small minority of people. Most of the world spins just fine on Black Friday. I agree, opening on Thanksgiving is a terrible thing for businesses to do. But saying Black Friday/Thanksgiving Day Shopping is “not really [an] individual choice” is madness. ---
**Author:** ![monstro](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/ba9def/32.png) [@monstro](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/monstro)\ **Post date:** [November 15, 2014, 11:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/black-friday-is-there-a-cure/704701/29 "2014-11-15T23:55:24Z")
> [@erysichthon](#): > > I also find it irritating that people assume that everyone lurrrves holidays, or that everyone has families to be with. Hell, maybe some people don’t want to be with their families because everyone ends up drunk and arguing. > > Yeah, Black Friday sucks and I wouldn’t dream of going near a big-box store that day. But I find this compulsory “you _must_ spend the day with your family” shit just as obnoxious. I think a lot of holiday depression stems from the strange belief that there is a “right” way to spend a holiday and that you’re a Scrooge McHeathen if you don’t want or can’t do it the “right way”. It occurs to me that the well-being of a lot of families depends on an economy that’s robust enough to support Black Friday. Our whole economy is driven by people buying shit they don’t need. Which is more a family-fun activity? Camping out to buy the latest iPad, or lining up at the food pantry? I guess I’d rather hear about record high Black Friday sales than record high unemployment. I don’t know if it’s possible for us to have both a healthy economy and one where everyone is frugal and anti-consumerist. Maybe it is, but I think we need to be careful what we wish for. ---
**Author:** ![Miller](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/miller/32/481_2.png) [@Miller](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Miller)\ **Post date:** [November 16, 2014, 12:12am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/black-friday-is-there-a-cure/704701/30 "2014-11-16T00:12:44Z")
Whoops. Thought I was in the Pit. Never mind. ---
**Author:** ![GrumpyBunny](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/bc8723/32.png) [@GrumpyBunny](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GrumpyBunny)\ **Post date:** [November 16, 2014, 12:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/black-friday-is-there-a-cure/704701/31 "2014-11-16T00:16:57Z")
> [@Octarine](#): > > There no cure for Black Friday; it’s just a symptom of the underlying disease. People are obsessed with consuming. Until that’s fixed, if ever, Black Friday will continue. This, and thank you for saving me the trouble of typing it. I don’t go out on Thanksgiving. I don’t go shopping on Black Friday. In fact, if I can swing it, I take my birthday off from work and finish anything I need to (I buy throughout the year). ---
**Author:** ![Guinastasia](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/guinastasia/32/5751_2.png) [@Guinastasia](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Guinastasia)\ **Post date:** [November 16, 2014, 1:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/black-friday-is-there-a-cure/704701/32 "2014-11-16T01:08:43Z")
> [@monstro](#): > > I think a lot of holiday depression stems from the strange belief that there is a “right” way to spend a holiday and that you’re a Scrooge McHeathen if you don’t want or can’t do it the “right way”. > > It occurs to me that the well-being of a lot of families depends on an economy that’s robust enough to support Black Friday. Our whole economy is driven by people buying shit they don’t need. Which is more a family-fun activity? Camping out to buy the latest iPad, or lining up at the food pantry? I guess I’d rather hear about record high Black Friday sales than record high unemployment. I don’t know if it’s possible for us to have both a healthy economy and one where everyone is frugal and anti-consumerist. Maybe it is, but I think we need to be careful what we wish for. I think there’s a huge difference though between missing Thanksgiving because you’re an ER nurse and because you work at Kmart. One is a necessity. The other is not. Of course it’s not a scrooge. But it’s a freaking holiday. C’mon. And you KNOW the big wigs who make the decision to stay open on those days aren’t working then. They’re at home with their families. ---
**Author:** ![ZenBeam](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/z/3ab097/32.png) [@ZenBeam](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ZenBeam)\ **Post date:** [November 16, 2014, 1:22am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/black-friday-is-there-a-cure/704701/33 "2014-11-16T01:22:22Z")
The cure for Black Friday encroaching on Thanksgiving is Black Wednesday. The sales will sometime in the next few years move across Thanksgiving to Wednesday, then continue their inevitable march to [del]the sea[/del] Halloween. ---
**Author:** ![hajario](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/hajario/32/171_2.png) [@hajario](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/hajario)\ **Post date:** [November 16, 2014, 1:31am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/black-friday-is-there-a-cure/704701/34 "2014-11-16T01:31:03Z")
> [@Guinastasia](#): > > I think there’s a huge difference though between missing Thanksgiving because you’re an ER nurse and because you work at Kmart. One is a necessity. The other is not. Of course it’s not a scrooge. But it’s a freaking holiday. C’mon. > > And you KNOW the big wigs who make the decision to stay open on those days aren’t working then. They’re at home with their families. How do you know this? My guess is that they got where they are because they are insane workaholics and they probably are working. We can all agree that an ER nurse is a necessity. What about a guy selling nachos at a football stadium? What about a dishwasher at a buffet restaurant? **monstro** is right. It’s fucking presumptuous to assume that it’s a holiday for everyone. How many Kmart workers are immigrants? A huge number is my guess and TG is not part of their family tradition and it’s not a holiday for them. The assumption that any given worker would be “at home with their families” just because that’s what you do is just plain wrong in a large number of cases. Closing down because it’s your holiday is depriving them of money that they need to survive. I wonder is anyone has done a poll of people working on that day to find out what most of them think before presuming to take offense on their behalf. ---
**Author:** ![samclem](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/a9a28c/32.png) [@samclem](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/samclem)\ **Post date:** [November 16, 2014, 1:46am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/black-friday-is-there-a-cure/704701/35 "2014-11-16T01:46:17Z")
> [@hajario](#): > > Black Friday is an old term and the day after TG has been a big shopping day going back many decades, well before most of us on this message board were born. Originally the term was because that was the day that retail outlets were finally in the black for the year. I love you, bro, but you need to keep up. Black Friday, the origin–NOT about merchants breaking even. > **[The Origins of "Black Friday" : Word Routes : Thinkmap Visual Thesaurus](https://www.visualthesaurus.com/cm/wordroutes/the-origins-of-black-friday/)** > > Thinkmap Visual Thesaurus: Word Routes - Despite commercial myths to the contrary, the true origins of "Black Friday" come from traffic-weary police officers in Philadelphia in the early 1960s. Original research by the SDMB member know as Tammi Terrell. Yeah, the Bonnie Taylor-Blake mentioned in the article. ---
**Author:** ![jz78817](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jz78817/32/1028_2.png) [@jz78817](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jz78817)\ **Post date:** [November 16, 2014, 1:47am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/black-friday-is-there-a-cure/704701/36 "2014-11-16T01:47:24Z")
> [@](#): > > Black Friday: is there a cure? staying home. ---
**Author:** ![May\_20](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/ce7236/32.png) [@May\_20](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/May_20)\ **Post date:** [November 16, 2014, 1:48am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/black-friday-is-there-a-cure/704701/37 "2014-11-16T01:48:00Z")
I worked retail during my college years. After I left for my career, I promised myself that I would never shop on Black Friday, and I haven’t. I’m saddened to see stores choosing to open on Thanksgiving Day. It does seem like that and Christmas Day have been the last holdout days that haven’t been simply handed over to the instant-gratification, buy-it-now consumerism that seems rampant in our society. I’m not sure that correcting this, going backward here, is even possible. If being open on Thanksgiving Day is profitable enough, more businesses will be open. If it isn’t, more will stay closed. I realize that is over-simplified, but that is basically how it works. ---
**Author:** ![monstro](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/ba9def/32.png) [@monstro](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/monstro)\ **Post date:** [November 16, 2014, 2:13am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/black-friday-is-there-a-cure/704701/38 "2014-11-16T02:13:58Z")
> [@Guinastasia](#): > > I think there’s a huge difference though between missing Thanksgiving because you’re an ER nurse and because you work at Kmart. One is a necessity. The other is not. Of course it’s not a scrooge. But it’s a freaking holiday. C’mon. Have you ever raced to the grocery store on Thanksgiving at the last minute because you’ve forgotten a key ingredient? I’d say being able to save Thanksgiving dinner from turning into disaster is up there as a “necessity”. What’s the one thing families tend to do on Thanksgiving? Cluster around the TV. If they aren’t watching the big game, they’re watching their favorite cable network marathon or Chrome-casting their favorite Netflix shows. Guess what? Working people are enabling all this. These things are no more of a necessity than tube socks at Walmart, and yet I don’t hear anyone calling for these folks to get a day off. > [@](#): > > And you KNOW the big wigs who make the decision to stay open on those days aren’t working then. They’re at home with their families. My bosses stay tethered to Blackberries at all hours of the day, and they are hardly “big wigs”. I doubt it’s any different in retail. I fully support more family friendly and humane labor practices. I think the current system sucks for the majority of people, and it’s not compatible with a healthy, sustainable society. But all the Black Friday backflash just seems to be an outlet for sanctimony rather than a push for labor reform. Workers want more $$. The unemployed want jobs. They don’t want people making them stay home just so they can listen to Grandma complain about Aunt Susie’s green bean casserole for the millionth time. ---
**Author:** ![hajario](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/hajario/32/171_2.png) [@hajario](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/hajario)\ **Post date:** [November 16, 2014, 2:19am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/black-friday-is-there-a-cure/704701/39 "2014-11-16T02:19:55Z")
> [@samclem](#): > > I love you, bro, but you need to keep up. > > Black Friday, the origin–NOT about merchants breaking even. > > [The Origins of "Black Friday" : Word Routes : Thinkmap Visual Thesaurus](http://www.visualthesaurus.com/cm/wordroutes/the-origins-of-black-friday/) > > Original research by the SDMB member know as Tammi Terrell. Yeah, the Bonnie Taylor-Blake mentioned in the article. Thanks for that. Interesting article. :fist bump: ---
**Author:** ![monstro](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/ba9def/32.png) [@monstro](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/monstro)\ **Post date:** [November 16, 2014, 2:30am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/black-friday-is-there-a-cure/704701/40 "2014-11-16T02:30:35Z")
> [@hajario](#): > > **monstro** is right. It’s fucking presumptuous to assume that it’s a holiday for everyone. How many Kmart workers are immigrants? A huge number is my guess and TG is not part of their family tradition and it’s not a holiday for them. The assumption that any given worker would be “at home with their families” just because that’s what you do is just plain wrong in a large number of cases. Closing down because it’s your holiday is depriving them of money that they need to survive. Not only that, but even people who have loving families and usually celebrate Thanksgiving sometimes forgo it. Several years ago, I was in this situation. Family was hundreds of miles away and I couldn’t afford a plane ticket, so I had no Thanksgiving dinner to sit down to. I ended up cooking for myself, but it would have been nice to pick up some take-out and go see a movie, if I had wanted to. Would have made the evening less depressing and lonesome, perhaps (my cooking just isn’t that good). For people who have to work on Thanksgiving (police, firefighters, EMTs, ER doctors and nurses, etc.), they no doubt appreciate when some businesses stay open. It would be a pain to have to get up at the ass crack of dawn and not be able to get your usual cup of coffee because HOLIDAY. Or not be able to listen to the news or music on the way to the work because HOLIDAY. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/black-friday-is-there-a-cure/704701.md?page=1) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/black-friday-is-there-a-cure/704701.md?page=3)