Facebook removed this post, I am putting it back. Some people may be upset when I post about it being wrong to shop on Thanksgiving. Here is why I feel the way I do. My parents had a gas station when I was a kid. Farm laws back then permitted child labor for family owned business. I started pumping gas, checking oil and so on at 9 years old. That is how I spend many of my days after school on weekends and holidays. Sometimes when my mother drove to pick up auto parts I would ride along and see other kids playing baseball and having fun but I had to work. I am not saying I never was able to play and do sports with my friends because I did have time for that but it was a small fraction of the free time that other children had. I can remember Thanksgiving days eating my turkey dinner off a hot plate in the gas station. Every time I pulled back the tin foil to take a bite another customer would pull up to a pump and I had to run to pump the gas. Those were the years before self service. I met my wife when we were both working in a store at a local Mall. During the holiday season it was common to work the whole day from when the store opened until it closed. They were long hours but the light at the end of the tunnel was knowing that we at least had a whole day off for Thanksgiving and Christmas. Eventually I went to night school while working full time and I moved into a technical field where I had holidays off. I am now thankful to have Thanksgiving off and to be in a warm house eating turkey. Everyone should spend a few years in retail or other low level work dealing with the public for low wages and long hours because it gives you a perspective that sliver spoon people can never have. It does upset me to see stores open on Thanksgiving because retail workers are people too. Just reading that the stores open opens the old wounds reliving the feeling that I had when I could not have my dinner because another person pulled up to the gas pump. I know that police, firefighters and hospital staff must work every Holiday and God bless them because people would die without them. Nobody is going to die if they have to wait just one more day to buy a Malibu Barbie on Black Friday. Our choices and actions ripple across society. If people keep giving in to shopping on Thanksgiving the entire holiday will be long gone by the time our children grow up. Then it will just be another cold morning fighting with traffic to go to work. Thank you for reading this. John
Posted on: Sat, 30 Nov 2013 17:07:49 +0000
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