UI alumnus sparks old-fashioned boycott through Facebook for holiday sales on Thanksgiving
Alyssa Ward worked a register near a boot sale during Black Friday at the Moscow Macy’s last year. Her shift started at 7:30 p.m. Thanksgiving Day, just like every other Macy’s employee.
“There were people running and pushing each other, people were mad they didn’t get the boots they wanted or the shoes in their size and I don’t think people should act like that,” Ward said. “It looks like we don’t even care about the holiday.”
Brian Rich
Ward, a University of Idaho senior studying public relations, is among thousands of retail employees across the nation who are forced to work on Thanksgiving Day to accommodate early Black Friday sales.
“It was the worst retail shift of my life,” she said.
Following the economic recession, Black Friday was the retail world’s way of showing consumers the economy could bounce back. The sometimes-violent sales started earlier and earlier, and shoppers flooded stores as early as midnight on Friday morning. By 2011, stores like Toys ‘R Us started opening on Thanksgiving Day for Black Friday sales.
UI alumnus Brian Rich said he was appalled when the shopping season began to intrude on a day dedicated to giving thanks for what people already have. Rich is a former Argonaut employee.
“Thanksgiving is the one day a year we have to shut up and stop being greedy for new things,” Rich said. “To see these big obnoxious sales trample all over Thanksgiving really made me angry. It was so offensive to me to put these monstrous and usually violent Black Friday sales on Thanksgiving. It just turned it into Black Thursday.”
And so the Facebook page Boycott Black Thursday was born.
Rich started the page in 2011, and now it’s closing in on 100,000 followers — and adding thousands more every day.
He ended the 2011 Thanksgiving season with just 46 fans who supported his cause. As Thanksgiving 2012 drew closer, he started to post about stores opening on Thursday, outrageous sales and Black Thursday news. That year, the page grew to a few hundred fans. By the beginning of October 2014, the page had just over 7,000 followers and now boasts more than 95,000.
Rich said although there seems to be ample support for the movement, he’s not sure how to quantify the actual success of the page. He said there have been small victories that make the movement worth the time and effort to manage.
RadioShack announced it would be open from 8 a.m. to midnight on Thanksgiving Day this year. Rich and the page’s co-administrator — Atlanta, Georgia, blogger Meghan Cooper — received a private message from a RadioShack employee containing a photo of an internal memo to the staff outlining the reasons for opening on Thanksgiving. They posted the memo on the Boycott Black Thursday page — sparking conversation across the nation about Black Thursday.
Rich said within 48 hours, RadioShack released a second memo. After receiving employee feedback, company executives decided RadioShack stores would close from noon to 5 p.m. to allow employees to spend at least some of Thanksgiving with their families.
“There is no perfect solution, however we need to do the right thing for our customers, our community and our associates,” company executives said in the memo.
Rich said he suspects the Facebook page has a hand in the company executives’ change of heart.
“I like to think that in some small way, we helped save thousands of employees time for Thanksgiving,” Rich said. “That feels pretty good even if that’s the only thing we’ve done.”
Ward no longer works at Macy’s. Instead, she works at family-owned Sam Dial Jewelers in Pullman. Because it’s not a corporate entity, Ward said the managers are more considerate of the holiday and will not open on Thanksgiving.
Having worked in both the corporate and family-owned sides of the retail world, Ward said she doesn’t believe opening on Thanksgiving is good for a store’s image or the employees and its customers.
“I think it just fuels the consumerism mindset that everyone has right now in society,” Ward said. “You can wait a day for sales. You don’t need to be open on Thanksgiving. I don’t think it’s fair to employees.”
Rich said he hasn’t spent a dime or sent a single press release to publicize the Boycott Black Thursday movement. He said the support has been completely organic, and if the movement were to grow beyond a Facebook page, any monetary gain would be donated to soup kitchens and other organizations that support Thanksgiving.
“The core point of the page — it’s easy to get mired in politics — but the whole point of the page is to ask people to just not shop on Thanksgiving,” Rich said. “Just don’t walk through the doors of a retailer. If enough people did that and it wasn’t profitable to open — if we could keep the sales down so it wasn’t profitable — it’d be a big loser for them. This isn’t about government or anything. This is about asking consumers to just stage a good old-fashioned boycott.”
Kaitlyn Krasselt can be reached at [email protected]