Several major retailers have recently announced their intent to open early on Thanksgiving Day to allow consumers to get a jump start on their Black Friday shopping.
Popular department stores like Macy’s and J.C. Penney have decided to open their doors to shoppers on Thursday November 28 rather than opening early on Black Friday.
Kohl’s has also announced that it will be opening at 8 p.m. on Thanksgiving and will remain open through Black Friday.
It is rumored that other popular stores like Target and Toys R’ Us also plan to follow this trend by opening at 9 p.m. on Thanksgiving.
To say that I am saddened and disappointed by this news would be an understatement, yet I am not surprised. Thanksgiving has always been one of my favorite holidays and has become increasingly important to my family and I as the years have gone by.
Thanksgiving is simple. You gather with the people that are important to you and share a meal. There’s no excessive decorating or gift-giving.
This holiday is much different than most other holidays and more important than most people realize.
In our consumer culture how often do we take even a minute out to be thankful let alone a whole day? Almost never.
As a child I remember driving past the extremely crowded parking lot of Best Buy the day after Thanksgiving and thinking it was a little strange even then.Now it is absolutely insane.
It baffles me how we can spend a day being thankful for what we have only to wake up at 5 a.m. or leave our meal that very same night to race through packed stores and trample people to get good prices on what we don’t have.
Sadly, we are trampling right over Thanksgiving without a second thought.
We have been watching Thanksgiving die slowly for years now. With each passing year we cut the thankfulness a little bit shorter, and now, Black Friday and Thanksgiving have officially merged.
I understand that the money generated from holiday shopping is essential to our economy.
However, I cannot fathom why beginning the Christmas shopping season before Thanksgiving has fully ended is necessary.
This really sheds a light on a broader issue.
Shouldn’t we be spending much more time being thankful for what we have in general?
I constantly find myself having thoughts like “I need to get the new IPhone” while I am failing to realize the fact that I even have an IPhone to begin with is incredible and is a gift most people in the world will never experience. Realizations like this are rare for me and my peers and that’s unfortunate.
It seems like we can never have enough. We should be vastly decreasing the time we spend in a shopping frenzy and increasing the amount of time we spend being thankful for things that really matter and everything we already have.
By extending the Black Friday shopping hours to a point where they overlap with Thanksgiving we are doing just the opposite.
We are limiting the already scarce amount of time we spend thinking about what we have instead of what we want.
This year, try to hold off on your holiday shopping. Even postponing our shopping one day is the step in the right direction.
Allow Thanksgiving to really be celebrated in full and allow yourself the time to actually be thankful.
We might miss some of the sales, but we might also find that we spent a little extra time with the people that matter which is far more valuable.
Bridget Goedeke
Viewpoints Editor
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