Wal-Mart, Old Navy, K-Mart give Thanks

for the incredibly weak employment legislation that they have consistently lobbied and therefore paid for over many years.

K-Mart, Books-a-Million Bookstores, Old Navy, Wal-Mart. What do all of these retailers have in common? They are happily wrecking Thanksgiving for many of their underpaid and under empowered employees by opening on Thanksgiving. They will also continue to wreck their employees Christmas by running them into the ground over the whole holiday season usually for a minimum wage.

Retail workers have a pretty thankless task in general and the recession and hard financial times just make matters worse. Excellent rant here about the big box stores now opening on Thanksgiving day and how this helps to ruin employees holiday.

In the 7 years I worked in retail though, I never ever worked on Thanksgiving. Never. And that’s saying something because I worked for some pretty evil bastards who would have gladly sold me into slavery if they thought for a minute that they could make a few bucks and get away with it.

In recent years, however, an unfortunate trend has emerged among certain big box retailers to open up on Thanksgiving day in an effort to squeeze every last drop of profity goodness from the holiday season.

I will throw the retailers a very small bone here, even though I do agree with the author that they would sell their own grandmothers for the price of a Snickers. The money pie is finite so if a competitor opens his store on a holiday then any money that crosses his counter is forever gone from the pie. It is definitely a race to the bottom. We know that Wallmart, just to throw an example out there, have absolutely no scruples or conscience when it comes to practicing business so it is easy to see how such a company could drive the whole retail industry into practices that are harmful to their employees.

This is no real excuse though and ultimately it all comes down to personal decisions so, if you are enjoying a Thanksgiving day with your family while your employees are not even seeing theirs and you had something to do with that decision I wish you a thoroughly miserable Turkey Day. I am petty like that.