Happy Thanksgiving to one and all! It is our hopes that everyone reading these words has enjoyed many blessings this year. We’re certainly grateful for those of you who have made this an interesting, thought-provoking, and productive year: you have made a difference in our lives, and we thank you for it.
Thanksgiving occupies a special place in the American pantheon of holidays. We’ve developed a complex routine. There’s the menu: the largest turkey anyone ever saw, surrounded by all the trimmings. After, there’s pumpkin pie and football … and that’s when the real activity starts.
We’re talking, of course, about Black Friday. Black Friday has become an event in and of itself. It’s the “official” kick off to the holiday shopping season. To see shoppers waiting in the frigid pre-dawn hours of a November morning, shivering and determined to get their door-buster special, is to see a special type of desperate competition. Crowded stores, trampling throngs of shoppers, furious frenzies to grab this season’s must-have item: for some people, this just can’t start soon enough.
Evaluating Difficult Corporate Decisions
Target has joined the throngs of big box retailers who are pushing back the clock on Black Friday. This year, they’ll be opening their stores on midnight. If you work for Target, you’d better enjoy that turkey dinner early: you’ll need enough time for the tryptophan to wear off so you can be bright eyed and enthusiastic!
Not everyone has welcomed the news with open arms. Target employees, in particular, were not amused. They partnered with Change.org and gathered close to 200,000 signatures from people who thought that Target should let their staff have an entire day of rest to celebrate and count their blessings.
Target has shown no inclination to change its position. Target’s human resources director has been quoted that workers should understand it’s a matter of staying competitive. Anahita Cameron said, “Our guests have expressed that they would prefer to kick off their holiday shopping experience right after the holiday celebrations, rather than getting up in the middle of the night.”
Employees who have pushed for an entire holiday off have been criticized widely in the media for being ungrateful. In an economy where so many have no jobs at all, protesting working certain hours because they happen to fall on a day reserved for national celebration and thanksgiving strikes some as clueless.
Yet one wonders. If Target had chosen to start their Black Friday slightly later on Friday—opening at 6 am, perhaps, or 3 am, they would have escaped this criticism entirely.
Did pushing back the big event to midnight on Thursday really gain Target enough of a competitive advantage that it more than offsets the damage Target did to its employee relations? What about the damage done to customers who care about how retailers treat their employees? Dominant organizations win when their employees are aligned with and invested in the organization’s success: actions that seem punitive or mean-spirited, such as intruding on what had traditionally been a special day, a guaranteed holiday, do little to bring a team into alignment.
Brand Modeling gives us the tools we need when we’re facing choices like how early Black Friday should begin. Target has indicated that they’ve had consumer demand for an earlier start. Did this demand come from Target’s best customers, who will follow through on their stated interest? Or will those early sales be more disappointing than the pumpkin pie Aunt Minnie brought for dessert? What do you think?