She still loves a good deal — last year she spent a couple of thousand dollars on markdowns that day, the Friday after Thanksgiving — but Ms. Nyberg says that she does not want retailers to ruin the holiday for her or their own employees.
Ms. Nyberg is drawing the line now that major chains like Target, Macy’s, Best Buy and Kohl’s say they will open for the first time at midnight on Thanksgiving, and Wal-Mart will go even further, with a 10 p.m. Thanksgiving start for deals on some merchandise.
Retailers, eager to be the first to draw customers on one of the biggest shopping days of the year, are pulling the equivalent of the Republican primary shuffle by opening earlier and earlier than competitors.
Last year, a few stores, including Toys “R” Us, pushed into Thanksgiving.
But judging from the negative reaction among dedicated Friday after Thanksgiving shoppers on blogs, Twitter and Facebook, the wave of midnight openings this year has crossed a line.
Part of the objection is inconvenience. To be at or near the front of the line, shoppers say they will now have to leave home hours earlier — in the middle of the turkey dinner for some. But the wider objections reflect sentiments like those of the Occupy Wall Street movement, including a growing attention to the rights of workers and a wariness of decisions by big business.
Either way, many in the shop-till-you-drop crowd have had enough with Black Friday creep.
“I just don’t think that’s good business, in a sense, to make your employees come in on one of the biggest holidays of the year and cut their family time short,” said Ms. Nyberg, 31, a saleswoman in Villa Rica, Ga., for a molecular biology company. “With the economy the way it is, no one’s going to say, ‘I’m not going to do that, I’m going to quit or get fired over it.’ ”
One retail executive sounded sad about the decision to open earlier. Brian Dunn, the chief executive of Best Buy, said that the midnight opening “became an operating imperative for us” after competitors moved their openings back. “I feel terrible,” he said.
A handful of retailers are holding out, like J. C. Penney, which will open at its usual 4 a.m. on Friday. “We wanted to give our associates Thanksgiving Day to spend with their families,” said Bill Gentner, senior vice president for marketing.
Still, some of the big retailers making the switch said that the response from workers and customers had been positive.
“There are many associates who would prefer to work this time as they appreciate the flexibility it affords their schedules for the holiday weekend,” Holly Thomas, a Macy’s spokeswoman, wrote in an e-mail. A Target spokesman, Antoine LaFromboise, said that employees will get holiday pay for Thanksgiving work, and “we’ve heard from our guests that they are excited.”
But even with increased pay, some retail workers said in interviews that the holiday hours were a raw deal.
Anthony Hardwick, 29, who works at a Target store in Omaha, said he would have to leave Thanksgiving dinner with his fiancée’s family so he could sleep before starting a shift around 11 p.m. on Thanksgiving, followed on Friday by a shift at his other job, at OfficeMax.
Mr. Hardwick says he is glad to have a job, and does not mind the early hours on Friday, but “cutting into our holidays is just a step too far.”
He added, “Even though it’s a desperate time doesn’t mean that we should trade all the ground that our fathers and our grandfathers, everyone that came before us, fought really hard for.”
He has created an online petition urging Target to open at 5 a.m. Friday instead, which had attracted a handful of signatures as of Thursday.
The concern among customers about retail workers recalls an earlier era, when consumer advocates encouraged people to consider the impact of their shopping on sales clerks, said Lawrence B. Glickman, the chairman of the history department at the University of South Carolina.
Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=97d607ed28d6f48ca26d5195aaeb43e0
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