Thanksgiving!

Everyone deserves a Thanksgiving. Uncontroversial, yet there is a disturbing trend of businesses being open for business, with increasingly full staff. Originally small in scope, this practice now threatens to turn the holiday into another meaningless holiday like Columbus Day. Stores do this now to snag a few extra dollars from holiday sales.

Of course, those sales wouldn’t happen if people didn’t shop. All the public pressure directed at the stores in the world won’t make a difference if there’s money to be made. That is why, if you care about Thanksgiving and want people to have a holiday, you need to make a commitment to do no shopping on Thanksgiving. None at all, you should even plan ahead and fill up your gas tank the day before.

Did you forget to buy something? Stuffing, Cranberry sauce, a turkey? Go without. The cost of perfecting your holiday is that someone else loses theirs. Are you willing to take someone else’s holiday as garnish to make yours a little better?

Is there a super-cheap two dollar waffle-iron or ten-dollar DVD player? If you really needed the cheap thing, you would’ve already bought one. And be honest, you don’t actually need it.  And they’ll all be gone by the time you get there anyway. The part of the cost of the trinket is someone else’s holiday. You aren’t that mean of a person.

Even a desire to avoid grocery shopping on Black Friday (This is for me) is not remotely legitimate shop Thanksgiving. My convienence certainly doesn’t taking someone else’s holiday, either.

So what can be done?

Make a public commitment (That is, on Facebook, to friends and family, etc.) to do no shopping on Thanksgiving, not even gas if you can at all afford it.
Challenge the people you make the commitment to to join you in it.
Get a group together and protest shopping at a local, large store. Be polite and remember you are protesting the shopping not the store. The best way, to me, to convince people is to make the case plainly and politely. Directly remind them of the costs of their shopping on that day.
Short slogans for signs I brainstormed are:
Save Thanksgiving, Stop Shopping!
Shopping Thanksgiving ends Thanksgiving!
Support Thanksgiving, Don’t Shop!

If you come up with a good one, let me know and I’ll add it.

Take pictures of the protests and post them for other people to see and promote the message.
Spread this post and the hashtag #ThanksgivingForAll
Public Campaigns will eventually be effective as revenue drops. At some point the cost of negative publicity (and being open) will be greater than the profit made.

Let’s roll back this foolishness.