Poor old Tom doesn’t get it. Once a few major corporate stores rolled back the starting gate on “Black Friday” Christmas sales this year to include the Thursday evening hours of Thanksgiving Day, the time for any kind of “Save Thanksgiving Day from Becoming Black Thursday” campaign were over before they even started. The dam has cracked, the cash registers are cranked, and the corporate chomps are already biting hard on the first blood of earlier sales.
Some brilliant middle management guy at Target or Best Buy is now being promoted for mumbling his or her way past the obvious with an e-mail to the big boss that probably went something like this:
“Hey, Boss! Long as we got all those people sitting out there in a line until Midnight Friday, just dying to buy stuff, wouldn’t it make sense to just let them all come in earlier so they can get a good running head start on spending money?”
Of course, it makes sense. The dictates of greed and the corporate profit margin, on everything from our life filling electronic toys to our life saving prescription drugs, has to be up there, highly maintained, and forever expanded further into the American psyche that, if you want to live, you gotta spend.
Now Thanksgiving Day is blurred forever from its originally created purpose as a day of gratitude for the deeper spiritual gifts of Life that we enjoy from God through Love, Family, Friends, Peace, and Health to a partial day in which spending money on the trivial now requires some of us to work on that day to keep our jobs.
This is one of those bells that cannot be unrung. The silent digital cash registers ring loudly where it really counts and it will not be long before they expand to take over the entire day – and Thanksgiving meals relegate to where they belong in a culture such as ours – something you grab at the food court on the way to Macy’s or Best Buy or Target or Walmart or whomever else is out there raking in the green all day soon.
Happy Thanksgiving Day, Friends! Let’s celebrate it while we still have it – while we always try to keep one big fact in mind that is far more important than the formal holiday:
Everyday is Thanksgiving Day if we are truly grateful for what really matters.
Bill McCurdy
The Pecan Park Eagle
The Pecan Park Eagle 
November 22, 2012 at 4:46 am |
I think this is a bell that can be unrung if people will just commit to NOT patronizing businesses on Thanksgiving. When nobody shows up at the stores, businesses will stop insisting that stores be open and people making minimum wage be there to service the people who showed up early for the promise of some elusive savings for appearing at some ungodly hour to buy a product.
You CAN kill “Black Thursday”. Just don’t participate and publicly shame anyone who does.
November 22, 2012 at 2:02 pm |
I won’t participate but that won’t kill it. I remember back at Christmas 1974 I was working at the godawful Pizza Inn on Bellaire Blvd as a manager trainee (ugh). We knew it was coming of course, but not the terminology. In both the Post and Chronicle full page ads read: “So our employees can enjoy this joyous time with their families, Pizza Inn outlets will not open until 1PM on Christmas Day.” I kid you not. That meant we didn’t have to come in until 10:30am to do food prep. Nine months later I was in grad school. &*^% them.