A lot of people are getting fed up with the way America’s retailers are forever pushing back the start of “black Friday” – that Friday after Thanksgiving which represents the largest retail sales day of the year. Starting some years ago, retailers started opening up earlier and earlier on Friday morning, offering “door buster” deals for those people willing to get there at the crack of dawn. Trouble is, each retailer tried to out-do the other – and now we have a lot of major retailers who are planning on opening on Thanksgiving Day, itself.
I’m not quite sure where this bright idea came from – given that I work in corporate America, my guess is a second-level corporate exec managed to produce some numbers which alleged that opening up an hour earlier you can grab some tiny percentage more of consumer’s disposable income – income which might be spent at other retailers if everyone opened up at the same time. I highly doubt that this opening up earlier and earlier actually increases sales – more than likely it just spreads the sales out over a longer period of time. At any rate, the corporate execs who thought it up are, likely, the products of business schools who are rising to the top not based on skill or ability but simply on the fact that when they first were inserted in to junior management post-college they were befriended by someone a step higher on the corporate ladder and just rose along with them year by year (with only those entirely screwing up along the way losing their place on the ladder). Essentially, they are just “managers” who don’t actually know what it is their troops do for a living (anyone who has worked long in corporate America is continually astounded by how executive decisions bear little connection to reality – but before any of you liberals out there consider this an indictment of the private sector, I point out that the level of senior obtuseness is vastly higher in government); most importantly, the corporate executives who are commanding their troops to give up their holiday for the sake of a 0.01% increase in gross sales won’t be there while the troops are at work – for the most part, they’ll be home with their families, enjoying Thanksgiving.
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