Black Friday 2013: Another Sign that Unregulated Capitalism is NOT Working

I should have known somebody would come up with something like this.

I think that the retailers respond "but employees get to be with family till about 6pm, so all is good" but i call bullshit. A) one can not fully relax and enjoy and B) one can not get drunk leading to C) the best parts of my Thanksgivings have tended to come in the evening

So, what else can we pass laws against.

Yeah, yeah. When I was a little boy in Orlando Fl, every thing was closed except drug stores, and most of the merchandise outside the pharmacy area was blocked off. Now, the only things that close on Sunday are drug stores unless they are part of large chains that don't allow sunday closure.

What's Thanksgiving to you? Patriotic or religious. Want to close stores. Fine. There goes Veterans Day, Memorial Day, Presid. . . . Take it away, hawkeye.

i lived in germany before the laws were liberalized (the first wave of reform, early 1990's)...you had to plan your shopping because the stores were often closed by law. I never found it to be a problem, one adjusts.

One "adjusts" to hanging, too. If one does it long enough

may I suggest that you listen to the Pope's lecture on the idolatry of money?

You may suggest. I may decline.

Would Communism or some other system work better?

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304355104579232132207017004

two points :

a) these retail clowns increased their costs and cost their employees quality time with their loved ones for no reason

b) this economy sucks a lot more than our leaders will admit

i need to add a point

c) when retailers placed their orders 6-9 months ago they assumed that the economy would be pretty decent by now. the economy sucks and it is actually getting worse. they ordered way too much stuff and they need to unload it, so the deals are going to get better and better. anyone who has money that they want to spend this year will clean up if they just keep their wits about them.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/robert-j-samuelson-times-have-changed-and-our-economic-vocabulary-cant-keep-up/2013/12/01/e0815260-5916-11e3-8304-caf30787c0a9_story.html?hpid=z3

despondency is a good word for what I am seeing in people, though I dont know why. I suspect that the lack of acknowledgment about how bad things are from the people who run our society collapses confidence that anyone has a plan, that anyone is working on this.

Britons despondent on future prosperity


http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/business/economics/article3923000.ece

I dont pay for news so I cant get the whole thing,

Having worked in Retail Management many moons ago, I can sort of get where hawkeye is coming from, regarding the pressure put upon staff to work all the hours under the sun at holiday times.

In those days (late 70's), anyone and everyone in retail management was told in subtle and not so subtle ways, that if they weren't prepared to put in every single available hour in the run up to Christmas, then they could basically wave any promotion goodbye for the next year.
The final year I worked in that god forsaken, thankless career, I put my toddler son to bed on the 18th December, and didn't see him (and on most occasions my wife) awake until Christmas day morning, some seven days later.
In that week I did four twelve hour days with hardly a break and working at breakneck speed, and three sixteen hour days where massive amounts of "prep" had to be done at god awful hours of the morning before the store opened.
Anyone here gutted and trussed thirty or so freezing cold turkey and pheasant before 8am, for three days running? Then ran around like a blue arsed fly for a further eight hours while hordes of customers stripped bare the shelves, with the glowing feeling that, once the store's closed you'd have the privilege of staying put and re-stocking those shelves until they were perfect again....day after day?

I have, and that's the reason why I partially back what hawkeye is getting at. If you've never had to do it, and I stress HAD, because I had no choice, then you really don't know what it's like on the other side of the counter.

I left the retail sector soon after that, having missed my lad's Christmas Eve and the putting up of the tree and the jolly jingle bells of the warm pub and winter ale.
I also spent most of Christmas day asleep or as near as damn it, and had to watch my alcohol consumption because I was opening the store on Boxing Day in order to start the post Xmas sales.

I got out, re-trained and ended up earning the same salary in a 9 to 5 office job with a whole week off at Xmas, but can still totally sympathise with shop workers each year, although the pressure has changed slightly.

Nowadays, if you don't want to work any extra hours, they don't worry about threatening you with non promotion...they just tell you to f### off.

There is one way where both sides can win. The poor deprived customer can have their beloved stores open on every holiday so that they can buy all their "essential" holiday food before chucking most of it away a week later, or their 84 inch plasma TV that will be obsolete come the January sales....
AND the store staff will be happy in working all the hours under the sun.

Answer? Make it totally voluntary for store staff to work on certain days of the year (Thanksgiving in the Usa, Boxing Day, maybe one or two others)
BUT....if they do, then they get paid DOUBLE time, with a day off in lieu at a later date in the year.

THAT will sort out whether the stores are serious about silly opening hours.

Don't ban them from opening, just give them (the store owners) the choice of whether to let their staff have a well earned break, or actually pay them a decent amount to go in to work when everyone else is having a major holiday.

Just my tuppence worth.

A couple of points...
1) The evidence is that the Thanksgiving store openings did cannibalize sales from Friday and
2) Aggregate sales for Thursday-Sunday sales were up only about 3% over 2012. Disappointing - considering relatively good weather and the shorter shopping period before Christmas.
The objective of the individual retailers is to get a bigger share of a pie that is not getting bigger.
Requiring stores to remain closed on Thanksgiving is not a viable option. Increasing the minimum wage might have an impact as would some sort of an increase in employee rights (I hesitate to use the word "unions.)
The public perception on product pricing is swayed by the big signs offering something like "60% off!" The government can regulate this scam by rules saying, for example, the discount must be based on what the prices were in October or early November. But that really is not enforceable.

The government should have no say what so ever on when a privately held business can be open or closed. That's crazy talk.

the government has long mandated minimum standards for treating employees, for instance min wage, overtime, and workplace safety rules, there is nothing crazy about government protecting the citizens from abusive employers.

I have already documented that thur-sun sales were down over last year even before the inflation adjustment. if you have different numbers please document.

a secondary option that I might go for is a law that no retail employee must work thanksgiving, and can not be punished for not working. this is somewhat unenforceable but it would help the unionless employees display a backbone.

Abusive employers? You'll have to get a little more detailed then that. Any sentence that begins "The government should..." is just about wrong. The only thing the governement should do has been outlined here.