Hmm. How would that work though? So let’s say I get up to go shopping on Friday. What do I do next?
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.
That is - IMVHO - a huge difference; game-changing. Life-changing. Another few years and it may be far more difficult to “just ignore it.”
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.
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?
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Whoops. Thought I was in the Pit.
Never mind.
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).
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.
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.
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.
I love you, bro, but you need to keep up.
Black Friday, the origin–NOT about merchants breaking even.
Original research by the SDMB member know as Tammi Terrell. Yeah, the Bonnie Taylor-Blake mentioned in the article.
staying home.
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.
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.
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.
Thanks for that. Interesting article.
:fist bump:
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.