Black Friday: When to open? Close? The debate rages in 2014

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 28: Post-turkey sleepiness doesn’t stand a chance with the millions of shoppers hitting stores on Black Friday, an American holiday shopping custom that has skyrocketed in recent years. Original use of the term “Black Friday” was associated negatively with the less-than-ideal conditions that occurred from the shopping chaos of the day following Thanksgiving. As years passed, though, the term morphed into its current meaning: as a day that retailers move from operating at a financial loss (“in the red”) to a period of profit (“in the black”). (Wikipedia has details.)

Black Friday is unofficially considered the start of the holiday shopping season, although holiday-themed marketing starts earlier each year.

In recent years, retailers have been opening earlier and earlier on Black Friday, with some pushing their hours into the evening of Thanksgiving. This year, some major retailers are proudly announcing that they will not make their employees work on Thanksgiving Day, despite the loss of profits. (New York Times has the story.) Internationally, Black Friday, along with its corresponding Cyber Monday and Cyber Week, has gained immense popularity.

BLACK FRIDAY:
FROM CHAOS TO COMPETITION AND BACK AGAIN

From its origins describing the chaos of post-Thanksgiving shopping, Black Friday only gained its No. 1 ranking as the busiest shopping day of the year in 2003. (Prior to 2003, Black Friday made the list of top-10 busiest shopping days of the year.) For several years, stores opened their doors at 6 a.m. on Black Friday, but in 2011, major retailers like Target, Kohls, Macy’s and Best Buy opened at midnight. In 2012, Walmart and others announced sales as starting on Thanksgiving evening; this year, Walmart will span its best deals over a period of five days.

This year, more than two dozen nationwide retail chains—including Costco Wholesale, Barnes & Noble, Bed Bath & Beyond, Nordstrom, Neiman Marcus and Crate and Barrel—have announced that store employees will be able to enjoy the entire Thanksgiving holiday away from work. In Massachusetts, Maine and Rhode Island, “blue laws” ban stores from being open on Thanksgiving Day. (Read more from the Huffington Post.)

Though their Thanksgiving holiday occurred weeks ago, Canadians have been getting into the spirit of Black Friday during the past decade, and 2012 saw the biggest Black Friday to date in Canada. Online retailers like Amazon and Apple have begun reaching out to the United Kingdom, and Black Friday was promoted in Australia by Online Shopping USA in 2011. Last year, Forbes reported that Cyber Monday had gained unprecedented popularity.

Are millennials to blame for the demand on Thanksgiving Day shopping? Some surveys have found that millennials are much more eager to shop on the American holiday than those of the Baby Boomer generation, TIME reported recently. Yet when all factors are taken into consideration, millennials also stand by the idea that employees should be able to spend Thanksgiving Day with their families—even if it means slowing down on the 24/7 deals that millennials have become accustomed to.

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