Stay Closed & I Will Love You Forever

On Monday, I mentioned how stressful planning Thanksgiving can be because we don't know when we can be where we are supposed to be.
Today, I want to explain that.
Not only that, but also,with not knowing when we could arrive somewhere, and having to ensure that whatever was going on does not drag on for too long, Thanksgiving is never very just focused on enjoying the day.

You see, stores are open on Thanksgiving. Because reasons. Reasons we don't know. And then there's Black Friday.

I worked retail for a few years. Thankfully, the store I worked at was closed on Thanksgiving, and was very set in stone that we were not to be open on Thanksgiving - it was always just a question of when we would open on Friday morning.
Awesome, right?
Not so much when you have to arrive at work at 3 AM the next morning, because the store is opening at 5. To then work a ten hour shift.

Which, sure, stores open much earlier than that. But that means for us that, well, we have to be home by the time it gets dark to have any hope of getting a decent amount of sleep.
It wasn't so bad, because it meant getting off work at a ridiculously early hour, but it was also in the back of my mind all day each Thanksgiving, about not only how stressful the next day was going to be, but just how early it was going to be as well (mind you, the store's normal opening hours were 9 AM and a regular morning shift started at 7AM).

Then, there's the stores open on Thanksgiving.
And, if you've been in a store on Thanksgiving, you think the people that are at the register, maybe someone stocking shelves, and that's it for the store. Which very well may be true, for employees of that particular store.

However, if the stores are open, they need to have a way to get things fixed if things are broken (like the registers). And that's what the Mister does. The company he works for has contracts with about a gajillion stores across the country, many of which are open on Thanksgiving (okay, not a gajillion, but sometimes it feels like it).
Luckily, if they are open, they close much earlier than normal. But they are still open, and they still need to have the ability to make a fix-it-now request.
Which they have in years past, and the Mister has actually had to work at least a half day because of it. And, his "on call" days are Thursdays. Guess which day Thanksgiving is always on.

So, even without worrying about needing to be home by a certain time for an early day Black Friday anymore, we still have to deal with not knowing if/what hours he will work on Thanksgiving, and if he will get paged out in the evening (as most stores are closed early, but not all). If something breaks and it's important enough, it can very much so be a fix-it-right-now-you-have-three-hours kind of situation. And who wants to think of that when you could be thinking of, well, Thanksgiving things.

This is why I am patiently waiting for the list of stores that will be closed on Thanksgiving to come out. Because those are the kind of stores I like the most. The kind that isn't going to (potentially) ruin a holiday.

~Havok

P.S. I realize that there are people who have it much worse in regards to this situation than we do. I'm not saying that it's "so hard and troublesome and oh my gosh pity us" - I'm saying that it sucks, and it sucks for a lot of people, and it shouldn't be a thing. Also, to bring it to attention that the stores being open effects more than the people who are working at that store - like the Mister, who is employed by an entirely different company.

P.P.S. No, no Black Friday shopping for me. No thank you. If my planning turns out right, I will not have to leave the house at all that day. Cuz people be crazy, yo.