Yabbut, buying next year’s Christmas presents on December 26th can present its own problems.
Like that year I decided to buy my nephew a puppy…
The problem is that you are citing a difference that, if it relevant in the way you claim it to be relevant, clearly would require precisely the result Jophiel describes – a phenomenon that actually is nowhere to be seen, thus proving that the difference is not, in fact, relevant in the way you claim.
Just don’t go shopping on Friday. It’s not that hard.
I am curious about how actual retail workers feel about Black Friday. Do most workers hate and dread it, or are they happy about getting paid overtime or holiday pay for it? Are the people working on Thanksgiving and Black Friday volunteers who don’t care about Thanksgiving as much, or are they forced to be there despite asking for it off and are bitter about it? If anyone knows of any surveys about this I’d like to see them. I read something recently about the Wal-Mart workers who were protesting at their stores regarding their pay but related to Black Friday, but I don’t know if that’s indicative of Wal-Mart workers everywhere or not.
Overall I agree with this. I’m not thrilled with Black Friday being so crazy, and families having to interrupt their Thanksgiving because family members have to go work at the mall. But if I was going to change things for the better for retail workers, I would definitely focus on livable wages, predictable scheduling, and maybe some more labor protections. Black Friday would be further down the list.
But no one is complaining about stores opening the Saturday before Christmas.
It feels like ‘Black Friday’ has become like box office grosses. People, especially business people, love stats. You can compare this years Black Friday sales to last years. You can forecast all Christmas sales from your Black Friday stats. And the push to have a bigger ‘opening weekend’ is greater and greater. Just like how some big movies open on Thursday or even Wednesday to try and boost their ‘opening weekend’, black Friday has this sort of mission creep.
There is no cure for this.
[quote=“monstro, post:20, topic:704701”]
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?/QUOTE]
And I will be producing Electricity for you to enjoy the day. If everyone would throw their disconnects to their homes, and businesses, I too could have the day off, but nooooo everyone wants their precious electricity. :rolleyes:
BF has made its way to Canada, or at the very least the trailing edges of the phenom. It used to be that Boxing day was the sole consumer day, with the best prices and such. But Canadian retailers , at least in Ontario, are being pressured by folks that make the trip stateside for the BF deals. A tv or what ever is just the same, no matter what side of the border you buy it on, but on the American side, its a loss for a Canadian vendor.
It would be facinating to see the lost time report, for industry, in regards to BF as unlike the States, there is no associated holiday on that weekend. So you might have walmart employees skipping work on the Canadian side, to shop in the same brand name store on the American side.
Declan
I dunno. Seems from my (admittedly not terribly knowledgeable) perspective that shops being open on a holiday will disrupt the family time of a low-income retail worker far more than the middle-class office worker. It is a class issue, but not in the way that you see it, IMO.
I do see your point about sexism and unpaid female labour, but…isn’t it possible to address that without losing time spent with your loved ones? Or even just a protected day off work? US employees have such meagre holiday time as it is.
In the UK the vast majority of shops are closed on Christmas, but, as noted in this thread, some people do have to work (nurses, doctors, etc). However, as it’s a bank holiday you would get that day off another time, and certainly NHS healthcare professionals get extra pay on top of that. Does none of this apply to those working on Thanksgiving in the US?
No they wouldn’t. The ‘double time and a half’ for working on a paid holiday is sleight-of-hand, and doesn’t actually give you any greater benefit (or your employer any greater disincentive) than working overtime on any other day. The only benefit is from the paid holiday itself, which is paid whether you work on it or not.
I’m gonna put this in Monday-through-Friday terms, but I’m sure you can adjust it to a retail worker’s schedule, or anyone else’s.
Suppose I work 8 hours a day, Monday through Friday. But Thanksgiving’s a paid holiday. I’m already getting paid for Thanksgiving, whether I work on it or not. 5 days’ pay for 4 days’ work.
If my employer has me work on Thanksgiving, under your scenario, I get paid time and a half in addition to my holiday pay. But the same would be true if I had to work on Saturday instead: I’d get paid time and a half then.
Either way, I’d work 5 days, and get 6.5 days’ pay. So there’d be no more disincentive for my employer to ask me to work on Thanksgiving than to ask me to work on Saturday. And no more benefit for me, either.
Which seems silly, because most of us would place a greater premium on having Thanksgiving free than having Saturday free.
I’m not well-versed in labor law, but AFAIK in the U.S., there’s no requirement for employers to give paid holidays, just like there’s no requirement for employers to give paid vacation or sick leave.
I agree, it’s barbaric.
Be grateful you have job!
That’s our labor law.
There’s no associated holiday on the weekend in the US either. Businesses that give the day off for Thanksgiving expect most people back at work bright and early on Friday morning. We did a poll around here last year showing that and even in light of the numbers, some people still believed that the entire US was eating turkey and watching football for a four-day weekend.
65% had to work on Friday, 35% had the day off
I agree with those who think this is a classist sort of complaint. My former job was in manufacturing, not retail, but we also were open on Thanksgiving. We worked with glass furnaces which had to be fed glass constantly, so shutting down was not feasible.
Some people wanted to work that day. Some people hated to work that day. Those working that day got paid for the day plus any shift differential plus double time holiday pay. Those not working got straight time holiday pay. Lots thought that was a good trade.
For me, I hate the idea of enforcing a single standard for how we should celebrate holidays, or how we should interact as families, or how we should live as people.
They already do. Well, not special online discounts, exactly. Just most of the same deals you could get in the store. The super-crazy “we only have five in the store” deals aren’t usually online, but the other stuff? Sometimes it’s available Wednesday night. I do a lot of Black Friday sale shopping on Thursday night, but it’s all at home in my underpants.
Not true, you don’t get OT until you work 40 hrs. If you work 4 days of M-F + 1 vacation/holiday/sick day & then work on Sat, the Sat time is straight time, not 1½ regular wages.
While the stores have only been open 2 or 3 years now, don’t forget that Macy’s employees have worked the past 88 years on Thanksgiving.
I steadfastly refuse to have anything to do with Black Friday and/or big-box retailers and their “holiday” sales. What little Christmas shopping I do, I do either online, at local businesses, or long enough after Thanksgiving to be irrelevant to the Black Friday nonsense.
I don’t think Thanksgiving per se is going anywhere; it will always be on the fourth Thursday in November. Keep in mind that this is a relatively recent thing. (Wasn’t there a time in the 1940s or so when the Democrats celebrated it on one day and the Republicans on another?) The parade and football games will help keep the tradition of “Thanksgiving dinner” on that particular day going.
But also, the tradition of “black Friday” has been around for decades as well. As far as I know, the reason Santa Claus is always at the end of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade is to “signal the start of the Christmas shopping season”. I assume Macy’s at Herald Square always opens its “Visit Santa” section the next day.
The only thing “missing” is for Black Friday to be declared a national holiday, the way Canada (for example) does with Boxing Day. Considering that pretty much every public school (and, presumably, most private ones) already gives students that day off, why not? How many parents already have to take the day off just so somebody can be at home with the kids?
However, if you really want to get rid of the mass panic that associates with the date, the first two things you need to do are (a) get rid of “doorbuster specials”, and (b) make sure no item that is expected to sell out fast has its initial release on that date.