When did Scrooge become a role model?
What are you even supposed to call the day before Black Friday now? Maybe the morning could be called “Thanksgiving” still, but the day itself is no longer a public holiday. In the never-ending pursuit of greater and greater sales, stores are opening even earlier this year for the busiest shopping day (now days) of the year. Some people are apparently ok with this. I’m not. Here’s why.
“Black Friday is when retail stores begin turning a yearly profit”
Incorrect. Setting aside that retail businesses that depend on sales generated over a 24–72 hour period (or even the 4 week period preceding Christmas) to determine their yearly profitability should have their leadership structure and business model completely reorganized, many retail outlets generate profit over all 4 fiscal quarters. Take a look at Costco, the company’s worst quarter of the five most recent quarters had a reported net income (profit) of $425 million (Q3 ’13). The company’s best quarter was its most recent at $697 million (Q2 ’14). Costco is profitable all year and is not open on Thanksgiving day.[1]
And let’s not get into how the deals that get people in the door are so heavily discounted as to be “loss leaders” instead of ones that make the retailer money.[2]
Meanwhile, there’s Walmart. The leviathan of the retail world which saw a 5-quarter low net income of $3.578 billion (Q1 ’14) and a high of $4.314 billion (Q4 ’13)[3]. Last year, Walmart issued a press release boasting that between 6 PM and 10 PM, their stores “processed more than 10 million transactions”. For sanity’s sake, assume the rate of transactions per hour remained the same, that’s 2.5 million transactions per hour. With “more than 4,000 stores”, (using the numbers provided by Walmart to Forbes) and assuming a consistent rate of transactions per store across all stores, each store processed 625 transactions per store per hour. That’s only an increase of (at most) 160% over their average of 250 transactions per hour per store.[4] Obviously there is value in being open during this time for Walmart (or any other retailer for that matter), the question, however is whether Walmart wouldn’t see the same increase in sales—or greater—if it ran similar sales on another day. I would be willing to wager that if they ran a sale the day prior to Thanksgiving or some time after Black Friday, they’d see equal benefit.
“Firefighters, policemen, doctors, nurses, and transportation workers don’t get the day off!”
These professionals work in a position that is an essential service that must be made available (the argument can be made that transportation is not an essential service, but I digress). Retail is not essential in any sense of the word. Anyone who thinks otherwise should reevaluate their priorities in life.
It is not arrogance or entitlement by retail workers (who make up >30% of the U.S. labor market) to expect their employer to close their business twice a year to give them an ENTIRE DAY OFF to spend with their family celebrating Christmas[5] or giving thanks for the country that is running them into the ground of which they are privileged to be a citizen.
These workers should not be content merely to be grateful for their jobs and suffer this pile of shit along with all the other piles of shit with which they regularly suffer. No, they are not entitled to employment. What they are entitled to is the smallest bit of respect of their time by their employers and their customers. The United States is one of 10 countries on the planet that do not mandate a minimum number of days of paid leave provided by an employer.[6] Many of those countries have paid leave that coincides with public holidays, allowing for exactly this.
Again, it’s not entitlement, it’s respect.
Those who are entitled are those who are vociferously complaining and loudly proclaiming that they’re proudly shopping on Thanksgiving because if they want to claw a stranger’s eyes out so they can spend $50 on one of six 900-inch televisions that will break in 3 weeks, goddamnit, there’s no day they shouldn’t be allowed to do so.
By comparison, Best Buy has seen a low of $43 million and a high of $461 million over the past 5 quarters. Their most profitable quarter was one that did not include the holiday season (Q1 ’14). Best Buy is facing lower profit on fewer sales overall—as are Sears, J.C. Penny, Radio Shack, and others—but the consensus generally seems to be that these businesses suffer from systemic issues unrelated to the benefits they’d receive from minuscule profits brought in on Thanksgiving day. ↩
The sales that draw people into the stores over the weekend following Thanksgiving often are considered loss leaders. Ever wonder why there’s only a handful of the so-called “Door Buster” deals? Often, the deal that shoppers who are—often quite literally—busting down the doors of the store for are financially harmful to the company. They continue to do this in hopes that limited stock of the sale item will lead to sales of more profitable items that are in stock through a combination of either upselling or purchasing the next best thing out of frustration. ↩
Meanwhile, the American taxpayers are subsidizing Walmart’s profits on the order of $6 billion per year (source) in the form of food stamps provided as low-income aid to its employees who make up from 1.5%–2% of the workforce. Think of the economic boom that could result from Walmart paying its workers a decent wage. ↩
Extrapolated using information from SAS in a white paper issued in 2012. ↩
Issues with promoting one religious preference over the other aside. ↩
The others, in no particular order: India, Kiribati, Liberia, the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Pakistan, Palau, Sri Lanka, and Tonga. As with socialized medicine, we are in illustrious company as a nation. ↩
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