Rajagopalan: Let's go back to Black Friday

Yesterday, we sat down with our families at our tables and gave thanks . . . that we could hit the stores right after we finished eating!

A number of major retailers kicked off this year's Black Friday on Thursday itself, pushing for the attention and dollars of a financially strapped public looking to spend less for more this holiday season.

Major discount stores including Walmart and Kmart got headlines when they announced they would start their Black Friday hours on Black Thursday instead. Many other stores opened at midnight last night, instead of the former Black Friday tradition of 4 a.m.

Market watchers say this is because stores with lower-priced goods are likely to lose the most during what looks to be an anemic holiday shopping season. The National Retail Federation projects that retail holiday sales will increase by 2.8 percent this year. That's a little better than the 10-year average holiday sales increase of 2.6 percent, but pales next to last season's surprisingly high 5.2 percent bump.

So the solution to the possibility of disappointing profits from trigger-shy lower-income consumers is . . . to ask them to start shopping sooner -- and presumably to spend more?

Low-wage workers and low-income consumers shouldn't be asked to bear the brunt of the flagging retail market. Belt-tightening is the only logical consumer response to an unemployment rate that won't drop below 9 percent and gas prices that rose 90 percent from 2008 to 2010, reducing consumer spending by nearly $160 million.

Of course, the choice was entirely ours whether we left our dinners and loved ones to fight traffic and lines under the glaring fluorescent lights of a big box store.

Not so for store employees.

For these retailers to open, many of their clerks, checkout people, floor managers, greeters and stockers had to give up their Thanksgivings altogether -- sleeping through the meal, parades and football games and dashing off to work just as the rest of us started contemplating a tryptophan-induced nap. One Target employee gathered nearly 200,000 signatures in an online petition protesting that store's plan to open yesterday. Still, a handful of the chain's locations were open yesterday, with most others opening at midnight.

For years, the commercialization of Christmas has been decried, with many among us calling for a return to the true meaning of the holiday. Now the commercialization of the holidays is starting to ruin Thanksgiving, too.

When the retail figures come out for this holiday season, we'll learn if the Black Thursday ploy was successful. I'm rooting for a bust. Because if it was a win for retailers, we can expect even more stores open -- at even earlier hours -- on Thanksgiving Day next year.

Unlike any other national holiday, Thanksgiving calls on Americans to pause from the busyness of their daily lives to celebrate the generosity and kindness of longtime residents to new arrivals, and to be thankful for food and fellowship during hard times. In this period of tremendous political partisanship and financial hardship for so many Americans, we need that kind of spirit far more than we need an early deal on a few mass-market loss leaders.

Kavitha Rajagopalan is a senior fellow at the World Policy Institute.