COLUMN: Break the doors, toss the turkey
Christmas is the season for giving, so the saying goes, but recent trends in retail suggest the adage might be perpetuated more by corporate greed than anything else.
I read about Target’s opening for this year’s Black Friday at midnight on Thanksgiving — the earliest opening ever for the store — and how many similar chains were following Target’s example and letting in the rush of rabid consumers the night before the shopping festivities traditionally begin.
It seems shoppers want to steal the deals right after they celebrate Thanksgiving with their families, and the retailers don’t seem to have any qualms about accommodating them.
The stories I hear about Black Friday get more absurd every year. I’ve heard of people getting trampled in the stampede of bargain hunters.
Is that the cost of saving a couple bucks?
The Occupy Movement, the protest against greed and corruption, seems to overlook how Black Friday madness is as much a part of that as the banks are. People are camping in tents and holding signs protesting how corporations have such a large pull on everything in American society.
But no one seems to be protesting how stores are giving families a chance to celebrate the holidays as a family by canceling Thanksgiving celebrations so they can all go out and buy scarves and shoes.
So what does it all mean?
Of course, it is a marketing scheme to increase profits in a down economy. Giving people a chance, a temptation rather, to shop on a holiday will probably drive profits through the roof. But what are the larger implications? What’s the point?
In a bad economy, people need to get out and spend money if the economy is to recover. But they shouldn’t be spending money they don’t have. That’s what hurts an economy in the first place and it’s likelier to happen as Black Friday becomes more and more like a circus every year.
I read the story of an employee who wouldn’t be able to spend the holiday with his fiancee’s parents because he had to rest up for his 10-hour shift at Target.
It made me ask: what about the employees of these stores being made to work long shifts? Holiday pay is great, but the purpose of holiday pay is to provide compensation to workers sacrificing time with their loved ones.
But loved ones are taking a backseat to business this year, it seems, and every year if consumers don’t start to realize this, there will be no end to this madness until they start to slow down, take a breath, and do a careful evaluation of what getting a good bargain is really worth.
