I asked the cashier at my local grocery store if they were open on Thanksgiving, and she said “No, thank goodness. I don’t understand why people have to shop on Thanksgiving.” However, the bagger had a different opinion. She said “Well, the men watch football and the women go shopping. That’s just natural.”
What do you think? Should people shop on Thanksgiving?
I will not shop at retail stores that open on Thanksgiving. Ever! I don’t think they deserve my money at any point, not just not on Black Thursday. I’ve “liked” the Facebook Page Boycott Black Thursday that has information about which stores are opening on Thanksgiving and which are not.
I asked myself, why has this issue become such a big deal in recent years and what I discovered is that in recent years many retailers have been pushing their Black Friday sales earlier and earlier. They’ve moved from early Friday, to crazy early Friday, to Thursday evening, to Thursday afternoon (aka Thanksgiving).
In 2013 Macy’s opened at 8PM on Thanksgiving and in 2014 they will open at 6PM.
I started doing some research on this and found Snopes.org had looked into the rumors circulating that Simon’s Malls were going to fine stores that don’t open on Thanksgiving Day $1,100 an hour. Snopes found that while this was true in the case of some malls, and other malls were not opening at all, they were unable to determine if it was a corporate policy or not.
I looked up two Simon’s Malls near my mother’s house in NY, about 1/2 mile apart from each other – the fancy, expensive one will be closed on Thanksgiving while the less expensive mall will be open from 6PM to 1AM on Thanksgiving. In fact, according to the Daily Show, that mall will be fining the stores that don’t open on Thanksgiving. How does a mall list open hours on Thanksgiving unless they tell all of their tenant stores that they will also open? For the mall that will be open on Thanksgivings, their achor stores are some of the ones already all over the press for being open on Thanksgiving:
Macy’s, Sears, Forever 21, H&M, Old Navy, Victoria’s Secret
To illustrate how this problem is affecting retail workers, ThinkProgress focused on what’s going on with Kmart, which is opening at 6 a.m. on Thanksgiving Day and staying open for 42 hours straight. “While the company says it tries to fill the slots with volunteers or seasonal hires,” Bryce Covert writes, the reality is that workers are being told to give up their family time at the last minute to sell gee-gaws, or they will lose their jobs.
I never shop on Thanksgiving because I prefer to spend that time relaxing and unwinding after cooking a big dinner.