More and more stores are staying open on Thanksgiving.
Black Friday sales were pushed back to Thanksgiving Day in a lot of places yesterday so that eager shoppers could forego the necessity of staying home with their families and go buy things.
What does this say about us and our sense of family, community, and even our ability to just stop for one day and be at home?
The National Catholic Register ran an interesting article on the topic today. More than one priest, including Cardinal Dolan, has weighed in on the subject. From what I read, it seems that they see this trend as another attack on the family.
I think they’ve got the emphasis in the wrong place. I think that rather than being the retailers’ fault, this phenomena of Thanksgiving shopping is another symptom of the deteriorating home lives and interior peace of a lot of Americans.
Far too many of us have lost the concept of home. We don’t even know what home is. We think it’s a house, a place to be furnished and shown off. We have no concept of home as a nesting, resting, sheltering place in the storms of life. We’ve destroyed the concept of home as refuge and resting place by destroying the family.
Our families, with all their dysfunctions and bitterness, have become the last people in the world a lot of us want to spend time with. Our homes and families, rather than being safe harbors in a troubled world, have become just another place where the nuts attack and the few sane ones battle for footing. Thus, we have the growing trend of shopping ’til you drop instead of staying home for one day with your family
We have also created a society where large numbers of people are adrift in the world, living as singularities. Our increasingly fractured families and nomadic lifestyles leave a lot of people without families to go to on Thanksgiving. Meanwhile our traumatic lifestyles create an obsessive need to be constantly in motion and an inability to rest.
So many of our families are scarred by divorce, drugs, alcoholism and a hamster-in-a-cage work/buy/work/buy mentality that we are rapidly becoming a nation of home-induced trauma victims. One of the hallmarks of trauma victims that I’ve observed is that they can not sit still. If they are quiet for very long at all, the demons of their mind start jabbing at them. So they go-go-go and make chaotic jumbles of their lives in the process.
The end result is that we’re developing a national inability to stay home with our families for even one day. That’s why I think the priest who’s quoted in this article has identified the symptom but diagnosed the wrong cause. The retailers aren’t causing this phenomenon. They are reacting to it.
These stores wouldn’t stay open if nobody came to buy. We’re feeding this beast. Not them.
The National Catholic Register article says in part:
Shoppers wait to enter a Best Buy store on Nov. 25, 2011 in Naples, Fla.
– Spencer Platt/Getty Images
DENVER, Colo. — The expansion of Thanksgiving weekend shopping to the holiday itself has raised concerns among both workers and clergy who worry that the change puts family time at risk.
Father Sinclair Oubre, spiritual moderator of the Texas-based Catholic Labor Network, said the store openings are a “disturbing trend” that is “an assault on the family.”
“We have almost completed the evolutionary process of having two classes of workers: those who get holidays off, and can stay with their families, and those who are forced to work, so that those who have holidays off won’t have to stay with their families,” Father Oubre said.
Retailers such as Sears, Wal-Mart, Target, Kmart, Toys “R” Us and Gap are increasingly opening their stores on Thanksgiving Day. The following day, known as Black Friday, is one of the most profitable shopping days of the year.
Business analysts cite increased competition from Internet shopping and some customers’ desires to shop on Thanksgiving as motives to open stores on what is traditionally a day off, according to The Wall Street Journal.
In 2011, retailers who opened on Thanksgiving Day earned 22% more over the Thanksgiving Day weekend.
Two popular Internet petitions on the Change.org website are protesting the changes.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In