Thanksgiving Internet Grinch

Editorial by Greenville Daily Reflector, November 28, 2013.

As families gather for this important national holiday to celebrate blessings and express gratitude, some will do so with an eye to a Thursday start to Black Friday sales events. Even purists who decry what they view as the hijacking of Thanksgiving by greedy retailers can see how it happened.

A look at holiday retail spending, and how the Internet and online shopping have affected it, provides a clearer picture of why many traditional retailers are exploiting Thanksgiving to boost their profits. It helps, also, to back up and include Halloween in the picture.

Halloween spending contributes from $7 billion to $8 billion to retail sales in the United States, according to the National Federation of Retailers. The NRF predicts Christmas spending will top $602 billion this year.

Before recent years when Black Friday sales events began creeping into Thanksgiving Day, retail spending for Thanksgiving was hardly worth recording. It was a big travel day, but shopping was never a consideration.

Along comes the Internet with its nonstop online shopping opportunities. Not everyone wants to nap or watch football and parades after the big meal. More people than ever before have begun using that idle time to shop online.

For many brick-and-mortar retailers who depend on the Christmas season for 20 percent to 40 percent of their annual sales, online shopping has become a threat to their bottom lines. For retail giants that also offer online shopping, it seems that opening on Thanksgiving Day should be less of a concern and not worth upsetting thousands of their own workers. Regardless, the Internet has forever changed the way the retail world functions.

Something that has not changed is the rule of consumer demand. A few retailers are capitalizing on the Black Friday creep into Thanksgiving by advertising their refusal to participate in the madness.

One ad declares, “Some things are more important than money.” Such ads are, of course, aimed at exploiting the outrage of consumers upset over the usurping of a family holiday.

“When somebody says it’s not about the money,” H.L. Mencken so correctly stated, “it’s about the money.”

For families, however, Thanksgiving traditions truly are about much more important things than money. Families and consumers of every stripe can be thankful they still hold the ultimate power of consumer demand. That, above all other market influences, will determine how and when retailers operate.