I don’t know whether to be exhilarated or depressed that retail workers for some big-box stores are protesting the expectation that they’ll turn up to work on the night before Black Friday this year. It’ll be very late that night, but still: It’s Thanksgiving, for Pete’s sake! The exhilarating part is that people are resisting. Good for them. As I write this, more than 98,000 individuals have signed an online petition started by a Target employee to press the company to rescind its decision to move its Black Friday opening back from the crack of dawn to the crack of midnight.
The depressing part is that they’re protesting on the wrong grounds, and thus I suspect are destined to lose. The irate employees are arguing that retail workers ought to be entitled to a peaceful Thanksgiving like anyone else, and that making them work is a breach of civic decency.
It’s a breach of civic decency, all right, but not because cashiers have to work. In many professions, someone has to be on call during the holidays, whether he’s a football player or a tollbooth operator or that skinny kid behind the counter at the gas station. Working on Thanksgiving is not ideal, but every year lots of people do it.
For stores to open on Thanksgiving is a far bigger issue, and far more upsetting. Something beautiful is being smashed before our eyes, with lasting consequences..
Target and its co-evils Best Buy, Macy’s, Kohl’s, Gap, Old Navy, Walmart (opening at 10 p.m. on Thanksgiving!) and Toys R Us (opening at 9 p.m.!) are not just competing for the marginal consumer dollar. They are not just trying to “stay ahead of the curve,” as a store manager told a CBS affiliate in Detroit. They are taking an ax to the foundation of America’s only remaining shared civic tradition.
During our lives, Thanksgiving has been a rare and sacrosanct time, the only single day in the calendar virtually all citizens pause in their activities. Over the generations, since Abraham Lincoln was president, Thanksgiving has become a secular holy day, a brief period when, to coin a phrase, there really is a kind of hush all over the country. Most businesses are closed, the streets are quiet; people gather to eat cranberry sauce and roasted turkey.
Like many precious things, such serenity is fragile. It can be smashed, sundered, destroyed.
We are a people of appetite, after all; not just for turkey and trimmings, but also for $5 Barbie dolls, $15 high-pile fleece jackets, and whopping deals on electronics. If getting big bargains means rushing through Thanksgiving dinner at Grandma’s, you know it’ll happen.
Bravo to the retail workers who are trying, if on feeble grounds, to resist the assault on Thanksgiving. Bravo, too, to the department store chain Nordstrom, which unlike its grasping competitors is demonstrating genuine civility by refraining from opening until the morning of Black Friday.
Black Friday, ugh; black-hearted Friday, more like. A cynical commercial imperative is now spreading its horrible stain over the Thanksgiving table, like an overturned bottle of ink.
Meghan Cox Gurdon’s column appears on Sunday and Thursday. She can be contacted at [email protected].
