Thanksgiving is the holiday for family. Unlike every other holiday we celebrate, Thanksgiving is the only one we dedicate to coming together with our families, both extended and immediate, in order to enjoy each other’s company, eat an excessive amount of food and bond over how thankful we all are to be together. That is, unless you work in retail.
I worked at Meijer for three years. Having just quit, this will be the first Thanksgiving I’ll actually be able to spend with my family and the people who are important to me, and it will be the first Thanksgiving in years that I’ll be able to eat a Thanksgiving dinner that hasn’t been refrigerated and microwaved.
Meijer would only close for Christmas, and was open 24 hours on Thanksgiving. The store would be a frenzy of activity in the weeks leading up to Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving is easily the busiest food holiday of the year, with people rushing to buy turkeys, stuffing, and produce to make the perfect Thanksgiving dinner. But on Thanksgiving itself, as people gathered with their families and the football game starts, things died down dramatically.
After 1 p.m., nobody goes shopping.
I primarily worked evenings on Thanksgiving, having a shift that would last from about noon until 8 p.m. I would see a few shoppers run in to pick up that last forgotten thing on their shopping list, and the occasional person getting their weekly grocery shopping done while the store was quiet. But aside from that, working on Thanksgiving was a waste of my time, and it hurt.
It hurt knowing that I was missing out on one of the few times of the year I’m able to see my aunts, uncles and cousins. I would come home from work late, usually after everyone had had their fill of dinner and gone home or gone to bed. Missing the family Thanksgiving dinner and having to eat a reheated one alone killed me. And all of this was to help a company squeeze out those last possible dollars from the Thanksgiving shopping season.
I was paid holiday pay, but time and half isn’t as much as you think when your base pay is only $8 per hour. It wasn’t enough to justify missing time with my family. And holiday pay is usually the justification I hear for why a store being open on Thanksgiving is good for workers.
“Workers often rely on that extra money to get through the holidays,” company spokespeople say.
And it is true: I would usually use that meager holiday bonus to help pay for Christmas gifts for the people I care about or pay for gas and groceries. But the extra money wasn’t worth the feelings of exploitation and sadness I experienced while wandering around the sales floor of a mostly empty store while my loved ones were together and celebrating a holiday that is supposed to be about family and community.
Thanksgiving frequently isn’t a holiday you can volunteer to not work. If you’re an employee at the store, whether you’re long term or seasonal, you have to work when they tell you to work. And with the ever expanding shopping holiday of Black Friday more and more workers will be forced to work on the holiday, whether by their managers or by their need to make that extra bit of holiday money to get by.
Missing time with my family was not worth the miniscule amount of holiday pay I earned for working.
