“Black Friday”, which is always the Friday after Thanksgiving, has been a popular day for shopping since the 1920’s. The sales have had people lining up outside of stores for years, but recently the whole dynamic has changed. In recent years, stores like Walmart, Target, and JCPenny have started their Black Friday deals on Thursday. This trend has caused a lot of upset and problems for employees, their families, and shoppers that enjoyed the thrill of starting their shopping on Friday morning.
Black Friday should not start until Friday morning. I feel this way for many reasons. For one, it is unfair to ask employees to come in on a holiday. Thanksgiving should be a time for family and relaxation, but it has instead become a time of stress and sadness for employees that have to work through it. Think of how many families are affected by just one Walmart. It requires a ton of employees to set up their massive Black Friday sales and many Walmarts are open 24/7. That means that many employees must work through the night, making it almost impossible for them to have a decent Thanksgiving the next day. On the other hand, the employees that are not lucky enough to be off on Thanksgiving have to work right through their family festivities. Kids are missing their parents, spouses are missing each other and families are overall separated. It is very sad.
Not only are employees affected, but so are shoppers. For those of you who haven’t been to any stores on Thursday night, I can promise you that it is chaos. There is always fighting over products, tons of people shoving and yelling and lines backed up across the stores. By Friday though, the chaos has died down, but many products are already sold out. It is unfair for the people who like to spend all day Thursday with their families to wake up Friday morning and go shopping, only to find out that the product they went out for was already sold on Thursday.
Black Friday used to be a fun event where people would wake up in the early hours of the morning, pack some leftover turkey sandwiches, and spend the whole day catching sales with their friends or family. Now it has morphed into a hectic time when families interrupt their Thanksgivings in order to crowd into stores to get products at a more affordable price. Companies should have the common decency to allow their employees to enjoy Thanksgiving without being forced to come into work. They should also value their customers enough to not begin sales until Friday morning when thanksgiving is over and people have had their family time. It will take a lot for stores to close on Thanksgiving day, but I have hope that in the near future, things will go back to the traditional Black Friday.
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