Giving Thanks - We Are Without Excuse

Jeff Reinartz: Black Friday shouldn't creep into Thursday
by Jeff Reinartz

Next Thursday is Thanksgiving, and I’m looking forward to it as much as I do every year. It’s the day to get together with family, eat until the top button on your pants pops and to give thanks for all that we have.

To this point Thanksgiving has managed to remain one of the few holidays that hasn’t been trampled over by unrestrained over commercialism to this point. Now, even our day of thanks is falling victim.

Before I go any further I should point out that I am not a door buster. I understand there are lots of people who thrive on this activity. One person I spoke to at work says she gets a kind of adrenaline rush from the fact that the stores are crowded with the hustle and bustle of shoppers, because for most of the year they aren’t.

I like saving a few bucks as much as the next guy, but the day after Thanksgiving I don’t want to be anywhere near crowded retail stores. All I want to do is sit around eating leftovers, watching football and hoping my belt will miraculously fall back into the notch it was in two days earlier.

I’ve never had any problem with “Black Friday.” I just never wanted to be a part of it. I’ve even gone so far as to tease the people I know who get up before the crack of dawn to stand in line for the opportunity to jostle their way through hundreds of other shoppers to be first in line for whatever happens to be at the top of their shopping list.

I have a problem with it now, because it’s encroaching on the previously un-encroached upon holiday of Thanksgiving as some retailers have chosen to open their stores at midnight or even at 9 Thanksgiving night.

These retailers, in attempting to create frenzy among deal seekers looking for the best promotions, are completely ignoring the fact that many of their front line employees will be with their families celebrating a holiday and dealing with the fatiguing effects of tryptophan. Instead they’ll probably have to report to work as early as 8 p.m.

These retailers do this at their own peril, as it was only a few years ago that a person was killed by a stampede after doors of one store were opened. Obviously we have pretty short memories where bottom lines are concerned, but you’d think they would want to be careful about the frenzy they’re creating.

So where does “Black Friday creep” end anyway? Are the doors going to swing open at 5 p.m. next Thanksgiving? How long before retailers start opening doors at noon on Thanksgiving and offering turkey dinners to the first hundred lucky door busters?

The good news is that some retailers, in protest of Black Friday creep, have opted to open their stores later on Friday. One employee of a major retailer in Nebraska I read about has even started a petition to protest his employer’s plans to open at midnight. He’s looking for 50,000signatures. I’ll sign it.

This has to go one of two ways eventually: These early opening retailers will realize they’ve perverted Thanksgiving and go back to early morning Friday openings, or huge profits from their early openings will obligate other retailers to follow along.

For now, this is what Black Friday has become: We line up to be the first ones into a store where we are going to spend hundreds on Christmas presents while listening to Christmas songs and buying ornaments to decorate our Christmas trees, and the workers forced to be there on Thanksgiving night to take our money can’t even tell us to have a merry Christmas at the end of the transaction.

Call me old fashioned, but I preferred a simpler time when we could just have a happy Thanksgiving and a merry Christmas.

Jeff Reinartz grew up in Austin and has lived there most of his life. His column appears weekly.