Don’t Force People to Work on Thanksgiving. Shop the Sales Later.
Katrina Trinko /
No one needs to be able to buy a big-screen TV on Thanksgiving.
That once seemed like a truth universally agreed upon. Sure, we kept the grocery stores open for part of the day for quick runs for forgotten ingredients, and we kept the airports open so people could fly home to their families. But not much else.
Talk about a bygone era. In recent years, the number of retail chains, including Target, Walmart, Macy’s, Best Buy and Toys R Us, open on Thanksgiving has grown rapidly.
There has been some push back from other retailers. Home Depot, Barnes & Noble, Hobby Lobby and Costco won’t be open. “We believe (our employees) deserve the opportunity to spend Thanksgiving Day with their family,” a Costco executive explained to The New York Times.
That’s something all employees deserve, but particularly retail employees, many of whom work for minimum wage or slightly above. The hours you work in retail are unpredictable, and if your friends and family also work retail, it’s hard to find a time when no one is at work. (Remember: Virtually no one gets weekends off in retail.) Thanksgiving used to be one of the few holidays retail workers could count on.
Furthermore, it’s not clear that employees are getting to “opt in” to working Thanksgiving — which admittedly some might want to, given that many retailers are paying time-and-a-half. Take the example of Kmart, which will open at 6 a.m. on Thanksgiving. Jillian Fisher, the daughter of a Kmart employee, is behind a petition on coworker.org “asking Kmart to … (allow) employees to request Thanksgiving Day off and to rely only on volunteer(s).”
According to Fisher, one Kmart employee reported, “Our manager stated at a staff meeting: ‘Everyone must work Thanksgiving and Black Friday. No time off.'” Kmart told liberal blog ThinkProgress, which reported on Fisher’s efforts, “Our stores do their very best to staff with seasonal associates and those who volunteer to work holidays.”
In other words, even Kmart isn’t willing to say that all employees are voluntarily working Thanksgiving.
But let’s forget the retailers. Consumers could fight back by not shopping on Thanksgiving. And that’s what we should do — if we care about our fellow Americans and preserving our communities.
After all, the holidays are a time to remember and take care of each other. Sometimes being a good community member means helping others financially or taking time to pitch in with a difficult task. But sometimes it means other sacrifices, including our own convenience.
Sure, some of us might want to buy that big-screen TV at 50 percent off on Thanksgiving afternoon. But let’s help a brother (and a sister) out. Wait until Black Friday.
Originally published in USA Today.