Change.org. Ever heard of it? It’s a website where anyone can start a petition about anything. I was drawn there looking for the petition that a Target employee started to protest employees having to report to work on Thanksgiving instead of enjoying the day with their families.
Despite some really nasty comments here and there saying the man should be grateful to have a job at all, I fully support him. Retailers have gone absolutely berserk with the Christmas selling season, starting earlier and earlier in the year and at truly ridiculous hours in the middle of the night in order to get a jump on competitors. Black Friday, which used to start at some reasonable hour like 9 a.m. the day after Thanksgiving, now starts at various times on Thanksgiving afternoon or evening. So much for a wonderful, relaxing holiday at home giving thanks and spending time with family. Christmas is far more important!
Anthony Hardwick wants his Omaha Target store to scrap its plans to open at midnight and return to its original 5 a.m. Black Friday opening. He says he’s speaking up for his fellow employees who cannot do so. His petition is at Change.org; at the moment he has about 187,000 signatures. I couldn’t wait to add mine. I’ve been fed up with the excessive commercialization of Christmas for years, and using it to wreck my favorite holiday is going too far. Six extra hours of shopping time, or even 12, is not going to make that much difference to either retailers or shoppers. People can just plan ahead, as they have for decades, to get their selling and shopping done before Christmas.
There are a lot of other petitions at Change.org, not the least of which is one opposing the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) that I wrote about recently.
I don’t imagine for a minute that a mere petition will carry any weight with a giant retailer in a knock-down drag-out fight with competitors for millions of Christmas dollars. But I couldn’t pass up a chance to express my extreme displeasure with the usurpation of Thanksgiving.
Good for you~ this so aggravating to tell employees that they can’t enjoy Thanksgiving with family and friends. I send my kids to college and tell them to work hard so they don’t wind up working in Retail. I know.
Yeah, really. A holiday should be a holiday for everybody, except maybe emergency workers.
I’m afraid that I’m a bit of a Grinch when it comes to the end of year holidays Pied, resulting first from having religion crammed down my throat as a child and later from having my kids brainwashed into thinking I should be willing to bankrupt the household for the sake of Christmas commercialization. But I absolutely agree that those for whom the season has special meaning should be able to enjoy it without having to work these nonsense schedules for the sake of adding extra bloat to their masters already fat bank accounts. I’ll have to check out Change.org.
I’ll match my Grinch to your Grinch any day. But my ire falls entirely on Christmas, which I have despised for decades as hypocritical religiosity drowned in nauseating commercialism boiling down to intense and unpleasant efforts to outdo one another on gifts given and received, not to mention annual fights about where to spend the holiday and with whom. Much of it not paid off till the following Christmas. Insanity. This is a holiday? This is fun? Bah! Humbug!
I bow to the master! But let’s not forget Halloween, where our children are taught the “wisdom” of pretending to be someone else so they can extort “treats” from their neighbors by threatening to play “tricks” on them if they don’t. And people wonder why kids think the “thug” culture is so cool! 😈
I think one would have to be a lunatic to go shopping over the Thanksgiving weekend in the first place. My ex-MIL and her sister used to get up at 5:00 a.m. on Black Friday to get a good spot on line for when the stores opened at 7:00. Crazy! When I used to do a lot of holiday shopping, I would just take a day off and do most of it in one trip on a weekday. This way I got to enjoy all of the decorations and storefronts without the mobs.
I couldn’t agree more. Lunatics all. For some years now, I’ve refused to go anywhere near a mall between Thanksgiving and New Years. What little shopping I still do, I do online. If forced to go to a store, we do have a couple of malls out here that are still pretty lightly traveled because the suburban development they anticipated/preceded has been almost non-existent in recent years.