Should Stores Be Open on Thanksgiving?

November 25, 2013: I recently wrote a letter to the editor at Newsday about the controversy concerning the increasing number of retail stores that are opening on Thanksgiving. Personally, I’m not happy with this new trend, but I don’t think that exclusively blaming retailers for it is quite fair. Newsday published a shortened version of my original essay, the complete version of which follows below:

Don’t Blame Retailers For Stealing Thanksgiving
By Mark Simon

Quite a few big box retailers, including Kohl’s, Macy’s, J.C. Penny, Target, Wal-mart, and others, are taking flak for announcing that their Black Friday sales will now begin on Thanksgiving Day. “This has gotten out of hand,” wrote Jan Burridge, of Waterford New York, who signed an online petition entitled “Staples: Keep Staples Closed on Thanksgiving!” “The holidays should be for everyone to enjoy, even those unfortunate enough to work in retail.”

A Tough Shopping Environment
While it’s sad that more than a million retail workers will see very little of their families this Thanksgiving, bashing retail management for being “greedy” or “anti-holiday” misses the point. Retail has always been a grueling, hyper-competitive business, and this year retailers are facing a nasty Trifecta of challenges in the form of a holiday shopping season that’s six days shorter than usual, consumer sentiment that’s dropped to a two-year low, and increased competition from pure-play online shopping services such as Amazon. Given this chilly environment, it’s almost a miracle that the National Retail Federation (NRF) is able to project that retailers’ take from the 2013 holiday season will be up 3.9 percent, to $602.1 billion.

Millenials Are Holiday-Agnostic
It’s also wrong-headed to think that retailers are leading some kind of concerted assault on a sacred American holiday. All they’re doing is dutifully following shifting consumer behavior patterns, which have become untethered to the traditional Thanksgiving-to-Christmas shopping period. According to the NRF, a whopping 40 percent of American consumers now begin their holiday shopping before Halloween, with 19.3 percent beginning before October 1. And Millenials (those between 18 and 34 years of age) are increasingly demonstrating that their shopping is holiday-agnostic: 36 percent of them reported shopping on Thanksgiving Day last year.

Although the NRF doesn’t tell us exactly why these young people are so comfortable shopping during a traditional holiday, it’s likely that this Internet-savvy group has been conditioned to regard shopping as a 24/7, 365-day activity which shouldn’t be constrained by arbitrary calendar dates. In a connected world in which soft goods such as movies, music, software, games, and other forms of entertainment are consumed on-demand, this new expectation is fair, appropriate, and natural. If Web sites are open for business on Thanksgiving, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, and Christmas (and most of them are), why shouldn’t stores be open too?

What Shoppers Want, When They Want It
If there’s anyone to blame for “stealing Thanksgiving,” it’s the modern American consumer, whose behavior, like it or not, is becoming more and more “untraditional,” thanks to the Internet and changing generational attitudes. Retail management is just doing what the online guys have been doing for years, and their decision to open their doors earlier is nothing more than an attempt to make things easier for their customers, many of whom likely dread the prospect of getting up early on Black Friday to battle the crowds for a couple of “door buster” items.

Nor do retailers have any real choice in the matter. Unless and until there’s some kind of treaty among competing realtors to stay closed on certain days, or a reinstitution of “Blue Law”-style legislation that dictates when stores can and can’t be open, “Black Friday creep” will continue, because no rational management will be willing to keep their doors closed when a direct competitor’s are open across the parking lot.

If you don’t like where this new world is taking us, you — as a consumer — have the ultimate power of your wallet or purse; if you object to a given store being open on Thanksgiving for moral reasons, you are free to spend your money the next day, wait a couple of days for Cyber Monday to roll around, or refrain from spending any money at all.