When I was growing up, nothing happened on major holidays such as Easter, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. Every place of business was closed and you spent the day with family and friends. If you needed anything on those days you had better have gotten it the day before or you were doing without.
Nowadays it seems like more and more places are open on holidays. Especially major department stores such as Target and Wal-Mart. Some restaurants are open, too, such as Golden Corral and Waffle House. Christmas seems to be the only holiday left that most places still stay closed. While I’m sure that this is great and convenient for those who don’t work for the aforementioned companies, for the people who work there it sucks ass.
I have two family members that work for one of the major retailers. In recent years they’ve had to work on Easter and Thanksgiving. Easter isn’t quite as big a holiday as Thanksgiving so it wasn’t a big deal. On Thanksgiving they would have to work about 4 hours, which isn’t so awful. They still had time to visit family and eat Thanksgiving dinner.
This year, Target has fucked that all up. They decided, based on alleged customer polls, to start their Black Friday sale on Thanksgiving night at 10PM. Not to be outdone, Wal-Mart has also decided to follow suit. Because of this ridiculousness, my two family members not only have to work on Thanksgiving, but have to work 12 fucking hour shifts. One has to work from noon to midnight and the other has to work from 2:30PM to 2:30AM.
What. The. Fuck.
So thanks to this idiocy, I won’t get to see two very close family members on Thanksgiving. Don’t the people running these companies give a shit about the people working in their stores? People are going to spend their money whether you have your sale on Thanksgiving or the day after. Give your employees a damn break. They work shitty hours, for shitty pay, doing a shitty, thankless job. The least you greedy fucks could do is let them enjoy a holiday with their families.
It’s extremely pathetic how commercialized this country has become. Every event has a sponsor. Every holiday is used by retailers of every type. Advertisements are everywhere. Somewhere along the way corporations took over this country and fucked everything up. Somehow, someway, things need to go back to the way they were. When people valued family. When values meant something. When everything wasn’t trumped by the almighty dollar.
It’s definitely unfortunate and frustrating that the holidays have been so commercialized by retailers and corporations.
But this commercialization is only possible because people, in general, want it. If people are willing to go shopping on Thanksgiving evening starting at 10pm just to “save” money, then the retailers and corporations are going to provide them with the opportunity to spend that money. Otherwise the retailers would be wasting money with open but empty stores and completely disgruntled employees.
You tagged this post “corporate greed” but it would be more appropriate to just label it “greed”. The only reason people get up before dawn on Black Friday is so they can buy things and “save” their “almighty dollars” as a result of the reduced prices. If people really valued the holidays they wouldn’t go shopping on a holiday.
You’re right. But they still know that no matter when they have these sales people are going to come, so they may as well have them on Black Friday.
That way, at least the poor people working at these places have had a day off with their families before being subjected to all this mayhem.
We will be some of those people shopping the big sale that night. Doesnt that me we are just contributing to it?
I really didn’t want to go, but you asked…
I would prefer if the damn sales didn’t start til 10 the next morning. Trust me, I’d rather stay home.