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Jobs should not require people to be there if they want to spend that time with family. This is one thing that is wrong with this country we put the almighty dollar above others and our family. You are right companies exist to make money that does not mean they can do anything they want. I really doubt unless it is a horribly run business that taking one day off is gonna destroy that business especially since around that holiday they will get more business.
Actually, as long as it isn't expressly illegal, they CAN do anything they want. Just as the employees can.
Do employers have a right to fire for refusal to work? In France? No
In America ? Up in the air
What do employers do when u take away their right to hire and fire?
Offshore subcontract and hire illegals
You really think that's why? They do that to save more money.
Have a "choice" up until the last twenty years, there wasn't a choice for a while, most places of work were closed for Thanksgiving and Christmas.
I'm 40+, that's not true. Yes.. I agree the occurrence has increased and shifted from just before Christmas to Black Friday/Thanksgiving.
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Edit: comparing the agricultural society we had in the 19th or even into the 20th century to now is a straw man argument because far fewer people actually farm today and more work for companies.
That's not true either. If you believe, this you are delusional or have little business sense. Little has changed in business; the same basic principles apply. If the farm doesn't remain profitable it must be operational 24/7. If a business is to remain profitable (and thus stay open), it must compete with businesses through the Holiday shopping season. A farm is a business. It simply operates under different parameters... 24/7 being one of them. Retail... is a business.. it relies heavily on the busiest days of sales.
All these people complain BUT what they don't realize is that for some of these businesses a large chunk of their YEARLY bottom line is made up during Holiday shopping (Not necessarily just Black Friday). The same business days that fund their paycheck.
What do you guys all think the money for your paycheck just comes from... thin air?
I'm 40+, that's not true. Yes.. I agree the occurrence has increased and shifted from just before Christmas to Black Friday/Thanksgiving.
That's not true either. If you believe, this you are delusional or have little business sense. Little has changed in business; the same basic principles apply. If the farm doesn't remain profitable it must be operational 24/7. If a business is to remain profitable (and thus stay open), it must compete with businesses through the Holiday shopping season. A farm is a business. It simply operates under different parameters... 24/7 being one of them. Retail... is a business.. it relies heavily on the busiest days of sales.
All these people complain BUT what they don't realize is that for some of these businesses a large chunk of their YEARLY bottom line is made up during Holiday shopping (Not necessarily just Black Friday). The same business days that fund their paycheck.
What do you guys all think the money for your paycheck just comes from... thin air?
No I know where checks come from, sales. I'm not delusional. I agree the farm is 24/7, same with the travel industry as well as rescue and safety workers but to use "it works for that, it works for everything" is a straw man. The issue is the farm from the 19th and 20th century don't exist the way they did now. To say they are is delusional.
The point is does being open on Thanksgiving actually help boost sales for the year and keep the firm profitable, if not make them more profitable? I've asked this to other posters and am still awaiting an answer other than Sears' which has suffered for years even before the Grey Thursday sales so it's an outlier. They are offering HUGE deals and contests including Old Navy doing a 1,000,000 grand prize just to get the lemmings in the door that would likely enjoy doing nothing if the stores were opening at say 1 AM and not 4 PM or 6 PM.
keep the firm profitable, if not make them more profitable?
A business would eventually fail if it were not profitable. duh!
Its this non-sense that I believe is the misunderstanding in topics like this.... a lack of how businesses operate. They are not people... pure and unadulterated profit (within the confines of the laws and regulations). I'm all for providing minimal legal protections to workers. I just don't think that businesses should be denied the legal right to operate according to market conditions. In the end, consumers set those conditions. I also believe that employers should be legally allowed to dismiss a person. You can't have it both ways; make it harder for employees to get fired while maintaining at=will employment protections to employees. Its a two way street. Employees want the legal option not to be subjected to forced labor/employment and leave at any time, they must accept that employers will too need similar legal protections to terminate employment.
If we as a nation stop expecting sales/deals during this time and stop making the Holidays the "season of shopping", the businesses will also adjust. Why? Because we no longer make Holiday shopping an unavoidable thing retail needs to live (die) by.
Last edited by usayit; 11-25-2014 at 12:38 PM..
Reason: make "right" to "legals".... just so because someone will bring up semantics of rights versus legal
Have a "choice" up until the last twenty years, there wasn't a choice for a while, most places of work were closed for Thanksgiving and Christmas. Most who worked were in the travel industry such as toll takers, pilots, flight crews, TSA workers, etc. or essential services that have to be open 24/7/365 like emergency services. It has only been in the last twenty or so years we have seen grocery stores open on Thanksgiving day, mainly for the last minute forgotten stuff and in the last three that stores opened earlier and earlier with 40 to 50% off sales and contests offering up to 1,000,000 in prices to get the lemmings into the door on thanksgiving night and now evening or even afternoon in the case of Old Navy.
Edit: comparing the agricultural society we had in the 19th or even into the 20th century to now is a straw man argument because far fewer people actually farm today and more work for companies.
I worked at a grocery on Thanksgiving Day over 20 years ago! Place was a mad house.....my kind of work day....busy busy busy busy.
Depends where you live how many people farm. In my county, there are more farmers/farms than any other job. Many people also work on those farms who live in the area. And I don't live in the middle of nowhere or in what people consider an ag state.
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Originally Posted by DubbleT
Yeah, because we all know that being able to buy Grandma Rose a half price scarf and hubby a discounted big screen TV ON the holiday is a necessity, just as important as making sure babies are fed and changed, animals are taken care of, and life threatening emergencies are responded to.
No one said they were the same thing. I was responding to someone who asked what farmers do on holidays.
A business would eventually fail if it were not profitable. duh!
Its this non-sense that I believe is the misunderstanding in topics like this.... a lack of how businesses operate. They are not people... pure and unadulterated profit (within the confines of the laws and regulations). I'm all for providing minimal legal protections to workers. I just don't think that businesses should be denied the legal right to operate according to market conditions. In the end, consumers set those conditions. I also believe that employers should be legally allowed to dismiss a person. You can't have it both ways; make it harder for employees to get fired while maintaining at=will employment protections to employees. Its a two way street. Employees want the legal option not to be subjected to forced labor/employment and leave at any time, they must accept that employers will too need similar legal protections to terminate employment.
If we as a nation stop expecting sales/deals during this time and stop making the Holidays the "season of shopping", the businesses will also adjust. Why? Because we no longer make Holiday shopping an unavoidable thing retail needs to live (die) by.
Retail companies were still VERY profitable before they went towards midnight madness, much less Grey Thursday which draws people in through huge deals and contests. If they didn't happen, the world wouldn't stop. It worked that way FOR YEARS and companies didn't really fall anymore than they do now.
Yeah, because we all know that being able to buy Grandma Rose a half price scarf and hubby a discounted big screen TV ON the holiday is a necessity, just as important as making sure babies are fed and changed, animals are taken care of, and life threatening emergencies are responded to.
Stop being silly and think how things work in our country.
We don't live in society in which government owns production and services that cater to the people. We live in a capitalistic state in which businesses live and die by operating in a competitive market. We don't open and close retail depending on the people's need.... we don't (ignoring things like TARP) prop up retail stores that are not capable of turning a profit in order to meet the needs of the people.
ALL of these things (and the people's paycheck that work for them) only exist because they operate for and only for profit.
So yes.... if 1000s of paychecks depend on that discount big tv screen being sold on the holiday, then yes... its important to those that depend on that pay check to provide food and support for their families.
As I said if we as a society stop making this the Holiday season of shopping and make purchases throughout the entire year, then holiday retail sales would not be a necessary operation of a business..
That is because retail is NOT ESSENTIAL like the medical fields, firefighters and police officers are. You can go out the next day and find most items no problem or buy them online and they get sent out by Monday, no need to goto the stores other than people who didn't prepare and need to get more food or beer. We've seen the YouTube videos or know of someone in our circles that launched a turkey because the fryer couldn't hold it when it wasn't thawed out or started an oil fire from over flow onto a porch. Guess who is called to clean up, firefighters. Even a grocery store isn't but you have the stupid people that as I mentioned in the post you quoted and replied to as well as this one that forgot the cranberry jelly, the gravy didn't come out right so they need a jar of Campbells, they ran out of beer while watching the ball game, etc. rather than do what me and my family did for all but one of the Thanksgivings I remember, PREPARE FOR IT and buy your turkey, trimmings and sides the weeks before.
Really, I had no clue about this internet. I've shopped online Grey Thursday before but as I said the orders aren't sent out until say Friday, Saturday or even Monday based on demand. It's not quite the Amazon droning service for Prime members we've heard rumored about.
My family pre-prepares stuff either the night before and/or the morning of while watching the parade and the bird is typically done in two hours (roughly one per bird) once the deep fryer is up to temp and the food is just hot holding in the oven for about an hour. Thankfully there's no Aunt Sue at our Thanksgiving. It was always a smaller setting, though this year we will have 15 or so people at the house. Not a problem food wise as we cook two birds and have like 5 different sides. We've done Thanksgiving enough this way, we have it down to a science and still have time to be social, drink and complain about plays during the football game.
Lemmings aren't but they make up the majority. Plus lemmings are the ones that packed your grocery store because they didn't think of buying more beer or not realizing the cranberries were not bought.
And I don't get being in a running of the bulls besides say a Disney park or another amusement park (though I don't do that all too often.)
They have been writing off the blue laws more and more because we are not in the anti-alcohol days of the 1910's when alcohol was prohibition-ed (it was a reaction to the lifting of prohibition) but because there is a demand for sale, it's going away. Grey Thursday is technically a federal holiday but besides essential services that have no days off, most places of work abide by it within reason (closing early for instance) up until the last year when companies thought there was an untapped market and were somewhat right but had to offer the Black Friday deals and doorbusters to get people in. But if the people don't show up, they won't have Grey Thursday because they will run at a loss.
I also wonder if it will actually be cheaper for the companies to pay the fines at malls requiring them being open rather than the overhead costs to actually have them open. Sure for 4 hours that's $1,000 but if you only make $80 in sales per hour because people are heading to the Macy's, Penny's, GameStops, Hot Topics, Torrids, etc., while you have an Art of Shaving boutique that don't have the doorbusters to snatch people in, while you pay five people $10 an hour to man the store, is it really worth it?
Christmas is different than Thanksgiving unless you want to talk about immigrants who don't know of the story of American Thanksgiving but I see your point with Christmas and both holidays actually have the theaters open. Christmas and Thanksgiving Eve are two of the biggest theater opening weekends with Memorial Day, 4th of July and now any Marvel Comic releases.
For Christmas, for the longest time despite America having no standard religion, Christianity (of its many sub-sects) was the base religion of the American settlers with a few Jewish here and there. Let's remember at least four of the original thirteen colonies were formed by religious freedom (Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Connecticut and Rhode Island (from outcasts of Massachusetts) with the rest being mostly English Protestants. Not that I am trying to rag on Judaism, but the majority of the way the nation was formed was based on Christianity and we had separation of church and state to prevent which form of Christianity would be forced onto the citizens like it was in Europe (Spanish Inquisition of the 1400's, the English Protestant church of the 1500 and 1600's, etc.)
I get it, you worked and from the tone of your posts on the holiday, you don't like it. That don't mean you are the majority. As others mentioned nowadays it isn't volunteer to work days unless you know your fellow coworker has family while you don't and I get that example but not demanding a worker to work despite plans made months back to have dinner or go somewhere for dinner and now they have to cancel due to greed.
As I've said, traveling is one thing and I'll agree with that. Personally, I don't know anyone who eats out besides maybe breakfast on Thanksgiving.
And what if even the lemmings decide not to go? They will LOSE MONEY and have to scrap the idea. OH NO
Actually, the blue laws I was referring to were in an area of South Carolina and they have absolutely NOTHING to do with alcohol. In one county, you couldn't buy anything except for groceries on Sundays until 1 pm. The county next door did away with that law years ago. I lived in another county several miles away and the law on changed about 7-8 years ago to allow for shopping on Sundays. The alcohol laws are completely separate and different.
Just because your family does Thanksgiving that way doesn't mean everyone else's does nor should they have to. I know several people who eat out on Thanksgiving. That works for them. I don't care what others do!
Actually, I volunteered to work Thanksgiving. I enjoy working on the busy days. Being busy makes your shift fly by. I don't mind working holidays....thus I volunteered! No idea where you got the idea that I didn't like it. I clearly never said that!
If you don't like what others do, stay home! Don't worry about what others do. Worry about yourself. You can't dictate to others what they can or cannot do.
Plenty of people don't celebrate or are done celebrating fairly early in the day. Many don't want to spend the day cooped indoors. There's only so much family a lot of people can take.
Retail companies were still VERY profitable before they went towards midnight madness, much less Grey Thursday which draws people in through huge deals and contests. If they didn't happen, the world wouldn't stop. It worked that way FOR YEARS and companies didn't really fall anymore than they do now.
Not totally accurate.
Black Friday existed for many many years but rank fairly low in the busiest of shopping days. It was an ideal day for retailers because it was after the last Holiday before Christmas AND Originally allowed retailers to give their staff off. Read... there was no market push (consumers) to be open on Thanksgiving. So despite what you may think, Black friday was original for good intentions. Why the consumers didn't make this 1st rank in busiest days? I am not sure.
It was the consumers that turned out and pushed for greater sales at earlier times. Being businesses are pure profit driven entities and have the legal protections to adjust to changing market conditions (again defined by the consumers), they started to grant the consumers' wishes/demands.
Remember, you are a business not operating in a vacuum. If your competitor opens earlier AND the consumer doesn't simply wait until you open up resulting in loss sales, its a vote for and a demand for earlier business hours and sales. You may be profitable in the past but that's not important if your loose sales to a competitor and no longer profitable NOW. Common!!! it should be obvious that whether or not they were profitable beforehand is irrelevant! No one should have to explain this.
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I've shopped online Grey Thursday before but as I said the orders aren't sent out until say Friday, Saturday or even Monday based on demand. It's not quite the Amazon droning service for Prime members we've heard rumored about.
