As occurred one year ago, when it first seemed to become a phenomenon, there’s a debate opening up about the decision of some of America’s major retailers to open on Thanksgiving Day as part of an early kick off to the Christmas shopping season, which judging by my recent trip to Target began the day after Halloween at the very least, while other stories are promoting the fact that they will remain closed on that day, and once again its becoming a point of argument:
This Thanksgiving, the open-versus-shut debate has grown even louder.
Walmart, Kmart, Macy’s, Target, RadioShack and many other major retailers are proclaiming that they will be open on Thanksgiving Day to make shoppers happy. But Costco, Marshalls, GameStop and T. J. Maxx are riding the backlash against holiday commerce by boasting that they will not relent: They will remain closed that day to show that they are family-friendly and honoring the holiday.
But even as retailers vie for every dollar during a very competitive season, Tony Bartel, the president of GameStop, views this debate as open-and-shut. “For us, it’s a matter of principle,” said Mr. Bartel, whose company has 4,600 stores nationwide. “We have a phrase around here that we use a lot — it’s called ‘protecting the family.’ We want our associates to enjoy their complete holidays.”
In a big difference from last holiday season — when more retailers decided to open their doors on Thanksgiving with enticing deals — this year others are firing back and promoting their decision not to join the rush to push Black Friday into Thanksgiving Day. They are happy to tell the world that they will remain closed on a beloved American holiday.
“It’s an important holiday in the U.S., and our employees work hard during the holiday season, and we believe they deserve the opportunity to spend Thanksgiving Day with their family and friends,” said Richard A. Galanti, executive vice president and chief financial officer at Costco Wholesale, the nation’s second-largest retailer after Walmart. “We’ve never opened on Thanksgiving, and when the trend to do so occurred in the last couple or three years, we chose not to because we thought it was the right thing to do for our employees.”
More than two dozen major retail chains plan to stay dark on Thanksgiving, including Barnes & Noble, Bed Bath & Beyond, the Burlington Coat Factory, Crate and Barrel, Dillard’s, Nordstrom, Neiman Marcus and Patagonia.
(…)
Pushed by competitive forces, some malls are opening on Thanksgiving Day for the first time. In Paramus, N.J., Westfield Garden State Plaza and Paramus Park will open from 6 p.m. to 11 p.m., prodded by Macy’s decision to open its stores in those malls.
Walden Galleria, a mall with over 200 stores near Buffalo, threatened to fine retailers about $200 an hour if they don’t open at 6 p.m. on Thanksgiving Day.
Carrie Gleason, director of the Fair Workweek Initiative, a campaign pushing retailers to adopt schedules that are more friendly to workers, said, “What’s different from years past is there are more and more retailers coming out publicly and saying, ‘We’re staying closed on Thanksgiving.’ ” They want to demonstrate to their customer base that Ththey’re family-friendly.”
More than 55,000 people have signed a petition on change.org urging Target to remain closed on Thanksgiving, while the Boycott Black ThursdayFacebook page has more than 87,000 likes.
(…)
Pushed by competitive forces, some malls are opening on Thanksgiving Day for the first time. In Paramus, N.J., Westfield Garden State Plaza and Paramus Park will open from 6 p.m. to 11 p.m., prodded by Macy’s decision to open its stores in those malls.
Walden Galleria, a mall with over 200 stores near Buffalo, threatened to fine retailers about $200 an hour if they don’t open at 6 p.m. on Thanksgiving Day.
Carrie Gleason, director of the Fair Workweek Initiative, a campaign pushing retailers to adopt schedules that are more friendly to workers, said, “What’s different from years past is there are more and more retailers coming out publicly and saying, ‘We’re staying closed on Thanksgiving.’ ” They want to demonstrate to their customer base that they’re family-friendly.”
More than 55,000 people have signed a petition on change.org urging Target to remain closed on Thanksgiving, while the Boycott Black ThursdayFacebook page has more than 87,000 likes.
Slate’s Jordan Weissman is even more vehement in his denunciation of the idea of shopping on Thanksgiving:
This Thanksgiving, millions of Americans will slide back from their dinner tables, get in their cars, and head for a postprandial shopping trip to snap up deals at a holiday sale.
Please, please do not be one of those people—both for your own sake, and out of respect for the retail staff who get dragooned into coming to work on a day they should have off with family.
I know. Complaining about our mania for holiday bargain-hunting, and that Black Friday now begins on Brown Thursday, is already a bit of a cliché. Progressive-minded writers seem to spend every November lamenting the misfortune of employees forced to show up to their job on Thanksgiving. The econ bloggers at ThinkProgress have practically devoted an entire month of coverage to the subject. Meanwhile, stores like Costco, Crate and Barrel, and Marshalls now brag about the fact that they don’t open on our national day of gluttony as a way of painting themselves as family-friendly.
But it bears repeating. Thanksgiving shopping, as it currently stands, is an awful tradition that should be boycotted.
These reactions are similar to much of what we heard last year in advance of Thanksgiving and what marked the first real movement by major retailers to open on that day, which many people, mostly on the left, framed as some kind of attack on worker’s and families by greedy corporations. As I noted at the time, though, in the end the decision to open in the late afternoon or early evening on Thanksgiving Day was really nothing more than the logical extension of what had been happening to the “Black Friday” phenomenon for the better part of a decade. What started out as early morning openings on the day after Thanksgiving slowly but surely evolved into opening starting at midnight, and then late at night around 10pm, complete with big extravaganza’s, special sales, and, of course, the obligatory shots on television of large crowds pushing against the sliding glass doors of the local Best Buy waiting for the place to open up and, if the producer of the local 11pm news was lucky, some guy getting trapped under the crowd or maybe even a fight breaking out. A few years ago, some stores began opening around 9pm or 10pm, when most people would obviously be done with their meals and the rest of the family would be in a tryptophan/alcohol/football coma. Each time the clock for opening time was pushed back, the consumers would respond by showing up, in seemingly larger numbers each time, searching for supposed bargain. Given that, it was only inevitable that some retailer somewhere would think about experimenting with the idea of opening on Thanksgiving Day itself, even though they likely knew that the decision to do so would likely draw some outrage from people who would see the move as trampling on a time meant to be spent with friends, family, fowl, and football.
The ultimate test of whether or not the idea of opening on Thanksgiving, of course, would end up being whether or not their would be sufficient foot traffic and sales to justify the decision. After all, opening a store even for a couple extra hours on a given day is not without its costs; there are labor costs, of course, but also the costs associated with operating the store ranging from electricity and other utilities to security. So, a retailer isn’t going to open on a holiday like Thanksgiving if they weren’t going to at least cover their costs and, more importantly, end the day with some kind of a decent profit. Obviously, the retailers who made the decision to open on Thanksgiving last year did so because they believed the customers would show up and justify their decision. As it turns out, they were largely correct, which is likely why there are many retailers who are deciding to do it again this year. On the other side of the equation, of course, there are other retailers who are deciding to not only stay closed next Thursday but to advertise the fact that they are staying closed. Obviously, they are hoping to appeal in some way to consumers who claim, according to the polls, to think that retailers should stay closed on Thanksgiving. As always who is right is something the market to decide rather than part of some bizarre argument about social justice, and idea that even Matthew Yglesias rejected.
None of this has caused the debate to end, of course. Once again, we’re seeing people complain about how “unfair” it is that some retail workers will be required to work on Thanksgiving, and the debate has even led some overzealous politicians turn it into a political issue. In New Jersey, Democratic State Senator Richard Codey, who served as Governor on two separate occasions when the office was vacant and the state still lacked at Lt. Governor to fill the position, has introduced a bill that would prevent retailers from opening before 9pm on Thanksgiving Day, for example, and a State Representative in Ohio has proposed a bill that would mandate triple pay for any worker required to work on Thanksgiving. Left unstated in their arguments, though, as well as those made by others who complains about the “open on Thanksgiving” phenomenon, are the countless numbers of people who work on Thanksgiving, Christmas, and other days when many people expect to be off. First responders and health care workers, obviously are at the top of that last, but so are people who work at supermarkets and convenience stores, athletes, people who work at all levels in the television and radio business, the support staff at sports facilities around the country, tech support people at Internet Service Providers and cable companies, and countless others. When I was growing up, my Dad worked at a chemical plant that had to stay operating around the clock, which meant that there was always a shift on duty, even on Thanksgiving and Christmas. Yes, a lot of those people end up getting paid extra for that time but they’re still spending it away from their families. Why it is less of an issue for them than it is for the people who work at Macy’s is a mystery to me. So, if you don’t like the idea that stores are open on Thanksgiving, then the answer is to not go shopping on Thanksgiving. If enough people agree with you, then the stores will get the message.
