Most of the Stores Open on Thanksgiving Day

The creep of Black Friday into Thanksgiving Day itself — with major retailers opening their doors on Thursday evening, or in some cases Thursday morning — has been one of the more contested developments in the evolution of American retail over the past decade.

The opposition to Thanksgiving retail openings is essentially conservative in the philosophical sense: it defends a tradition against commercial encroachment. Thanksgiving is one of the last American holidays not yet fully colonized by the retail calendar. It has no gift-giving tradition, no associated retail bonanza, no significant commercial infrastructure of its own. The objection to opening stores on Thanksgiving is that doing so transforms an occasion for family gathering and gratitude into a preliminary stage of the Christmas shopping season.

The retail industry's position is straightforwardly economic. The consumers who line up outside Target or Best Buy at 5 PM on Thanksgiving Thursday are there voluntarily. They want to shop. The stores that refuse to open on Thanksgiving are not protecting those consumers from an unwanted imposition; they are imposing their own preference for a commercial-free holiday on workers and shoppers who might prefer otherwise.

The workers are where the argument gets most uncomfortable. The employees working on Thanksgiving are often not there entirely voluntarily — they are working because their employer is open and has scheduled them to work, because declining means losing income or shifts they cannot afford to lose. The cheerful consent narrative that retailers deploy about Thanksgiving openings applies to management levels; at hourly pay grades, the calculation is often different.

The competitive dynamics have made the holiday calendar question essentially irreversible. A major retailer that closes on Thanksgiving while its competitors are open is simply ceding sales to those competitors without meaningfully protecting the holiday.