Commentary: Black Friday Gets Blacker

When I started working in retail over 20 years ago, the earliest time that stores opened the day after Thanksgiving was 6am.  Now it seems that retailers this year want to start as early as 9pm on Thanksgiving night.

Certainly, this is just SO wrong for employees and customers as well.  Why should employees subject themselves to losing family time just because their job wants them to work on Thanksgiving?  It is a little thing called CORPORATE GREED!!

When I worked at Woolworth, I never worked Black Friday because there was enough help so that I didn’t have to.  At Staples, I never had to work that day either until my 8th year with the company when they wanted everyone to work that day.  It would not have been a bad thing except for the fact that part of my agreement of scheduling was that I had Fridays off and I would work all Saturdays and Sundays instead.  This was an agreement that was violated by scheduling me on Black Friday.  To add insult to injury was that by the time I arrived around 1pm on this day, all the customers had all but disappeared for the day.  So here I was along with 2 other cashiers (usually) with absolutely no customers.  What a waste of payroll!!

Certainly, Staples believes in punishing all their employees equally without even taking into consideration that I had already made an agreement with them stating otherwise.  What really got me angry is the fact that usually I had previously taken trips to Connecticut for Thanksgiving dinner to spend the holiday with my uncle and his family.  Unfortunately,  I didn’t spend the holiday with them during my last 4 years which also happened to be the last years of my uncle’s life.  If you think I am bitter, you are so right.  I could not return over 250 miles just to return to work the next day and feel well rested.

So I feel very sorry for the employees who usually travel and will miss out on spending time with family just so that their employer can make tons on money.  It doesn’t matter if many of these employees would be holiday rate, absolutely nothing can bring back family from the dead.  This is certainly something that the greedy executives should consider when scheduling these unreasonable store opening hours.  Apparently, these companies need the money to pay their CEOs top dollar and make those unbelievable bonuses.