As Thanksgiving approaches, retailers around the country prepare for the busiest shopping day of the year: Black Friday.
As shoppers formulate their lists of cheap treasures, the widening eyes of retail workers countrywide have begun envisioning the potentially catastrophic series of events that all American retail workers have come to oh-so-closely associate with the holiday season.
Long lines, belligerent shoppers, and a seemingly endless brigade of highly caffeinated customers await the retail workers and their employers who work so fervently to keep up with the growing demand for low-cost goods.
Food Service Management major Kristina Mandelaro, 19, of Yardley discussed her experience working at Kohl’s. “It can be a living hell, even though I do the graveyard shifts. I go in at midnight and after 2:00 a.m. it gets really busy.”
Mandelaro went on to say, “I do multiple things. I’m a cashier, I work in the home department, I work in the kid’s department, I just got moved to the shoe department.
From 9:00 a.m to when I left, there were people everywhere – so I was cleaning up the kid’s department for like four hours.”
According to the National Retail Federation’s Preliminary Thanksgiving Weekend Survey, an estimated 135.8 million shoppers are expected to turnout Thanksgiving, Black Friday, and the succeeding weekend. This figure includes both in-store and online shopping.
Business Administration major, Rowan Evans, 19, of Bensalem works at Staples. He states, “I love my job, I love my co-workers, but on Black Friday; sometimes you’re just pushed to the point where you want to just ‘clock out’… The tech department always gets hit hard on Black Friday. Ink is always a really sought after item because it’s typically really expensive – so the lines are always backed up.”
Nursing Major Pat Thorton, 19, of Holland works at Toys R’ Us. He says, “Basically, my Black Friday experience is mostly focused on Thursday. This is because we open at 6:00 p.m. on Thursday and we are open all night… On Thursday before we open there is always a huge mob of people that swarm inside as soon as we open.”
Thorton went on to say, “On Friday it’s much more calm and people shop normally, there are just a lot of customers… As far as my experiences with it – It’s not that bad, people say it’s worse than it is.”
Thorton stated, “Thursday is so much worse than Friday. I never really have had a bad experience with those two days except one time there was a lady that yelled at me.”
According to the NRF, since 2012, Thanksgiving spending has outpaced Black Friday by a growing margin in online sales.
The holidays require some extra help, causing many companies to hire seasonal workers. This can make it difficult sometimes for the more tenured employees.
Mandelaro said, “The worst part about it is that I don’t get as many hours as I normally do, because they hire all of their new ‘seasonals’ as the holidays roll around. On the bright side; there are some extra hands!”
In order to stay competitive, companies are opening much earlier and staying open later. This comes at the expense of the store associates who formerly spent their holidays with family and friends but now must spend their Thanksgiving evening in a checkout line.
22-year-old Fine Arts Illustration major, A.J. Keller of Quakertown works at the Bonton department store, but doesn’t like working holidays. She states, “We’re apparently opening on Thanksgiving night, and we’ll be open all through Black Friday. I don’t like working on Thanksgiving, because it’s is a family day; I’m spending time with family that I don’t normally get to spend time with.”
For retail workers, Thanksgiving weekend has increasingly become a holiday weekend feared instead of loved. Fortunately, Black Friday is only one day out of the whole year. But if you’re out shopping on Black Friday, try to maintain some composure in the chaos.