Thanksgiving may just be one of the first casualties of increasing financial pressures on companies struggling to remain financially strong in an increasingly competitive retail environment. As Black Friday becomes Black Thursday families across America ponder how far business priorities will impinge on their personal lives going forward.
Retail employees have always known that retail work involved long hours and working at times when most people in other industries were off spending time with their families. Many companies have had 24/7/365 operations for years, including Walmart, the biggest of the big companies. But, for some reason Black Friday creeping forward at almost every retailer is meeting with a lot of resistance.
A Target employee speaking with CNN seems to be the representative of retail employee views on what it means to family life to work on Thanksgiving. Casey St. Clair was quoted in a recent CNN story about how this year’s Black Friday moving to Thursday impacts Americans. She is a part-time employee of Target and will be working Thanksgiving day this year and she told CNN, “It’s one of few days retail employees get to spend with their families, but at this point there’s no time to see family.”
Her complaints about working on this traditional family holiday are a common theme with retail workers across the country, as evidenced by numerous petitions that are circulating to try to convince retailers to put family first when considering holiday sales. The website change.org reports over forty petitions have been started on its site, all aimed at getting big box retailers such as Walmart, Target and others to “give Thanksgiving back to families.”
While the sentiment is certainly understandable, the reality is America has continued to tell retailers with their dollars what they want around the holidays, and it’s more sales and sales sooner. Businesses exists to make money and when consumers reward their behavior by spending money with them they send a clear message they are getting what they want. If consumers didn’t shop heavily on Black Friday in the past there would never have been such a huge focus on it in the first place.
So, how can retail workers ever expect to get their holidays back? The answer is simple, but it’s not one anyone wants to hear. Find another industry to work in if you want to have time off to spend with your family around the holidays. Retail is not the only industry that has historically had to work through holidays. Health care workers have had this issue to deal with forever. Hospitals don’t shut down at Thanksgiving, or any other holiday and they are not the only ones who have to deal with this issue. People who work in hotels, airports as well as police officers, firefighters and anyone else who works in professions that provide emergency services have always been subjected to working nights, weekends and holidays.
Many unemployed Americans would love the opportunity to work on any day of the year, and there are actually upsides to working the holidays. Many retail workers will get paid time and a half and some will even get bonuses for working on Thanksgiving. If working on a holiday is something you want to avoid, then you should make sure you work in an industry or profession where it is not the norm. Retail has always been an industry with challenging work schedules, so for many people all the ruckus this year about Black Friday is much ado about nothing.
