Leave it to corporate America to commercialize yet another special holiday. “Black Friday” is becoming a thing of the past—“Grey Thursday” is very quickly taking its place. It has become an oddity for a major retailer to not be open on Thanksgiving.
The newest store to announce its Thanksgiving opening, Target, will swing wide their doors at 8pm on the holiday, meaning most opening employees will have to be there as early as 5:30 or 6pm. K-Mart, on the other hand, will open at 6am on Thanksgiving and remain open until 11pm the next day, giving them forty-one consecutive hours of operation.
I worked at Target for six years, so I am quite familiar with the retail holiday scheduling. Although this hurts me to hear, I am not at all surprised. For the last few years I worked there, my store never hit their projected intake for Black Friday and thought to make up for it by opening earlier and earlier each year. I quit a few years ago, but on my last Black Friday working there, I had to be in at 11pm on Thanksgiving to open at Midnight. I thought that was bad.
Honestly though, part of this problem of nearly erasing Thanksgiving for many of those who work in the retail industry is due to those who actually show up at 8pm when the doors open. As long as there is a line outside the doors on Thanksgiving, dollar signs will remain in corporate’s eyes and people will always be missing out on precious time with their families.