SO YOU REALLY THINK COSTCO CARES ABOUT YOUR THANKSGIVING?
Oh, that’s adorable. You actually read the headlines screaming “Is Costco open on Thanksgiving?” and felt a warm, fuzzy feeling when you found out they were closed. You thought, “Wow, a corporation with a heart! They’re letting their employees be with their families!” Get a grip. You are being played by some of the most cynical marketing geniuses on the planet, and you’re swallowing the bait hook, line, and sinker. It’s a performance. A charade. A masterclass in corporate gaslighting designed to make you lower your guard right before they unleash the soul-crushing, wallet-draining beast that is Black Friday. This isn’t a gift. It’s the quiet moment before the ambush.
Pathetic.
ISN’T GIVING WORKERS THE DAY OFF A GOOD THING?
Is the bare minimum now considered heroic? We live in a world so utterly broken, so completely dominated by the whims of corporate overlords, that a company choosing not to force its wage slaves into the retail trenches on a single national holiday is hailed as an act of profound benevolence. Listen. This isn’t about employee well-being; if it were, they’d be talking about living wages, predictable scheduling, better healthcare, and not running skeleton crews during a holiday rush that leaves people physically and emotionally shattered. This one, single, solitary day off is a strategic retreat. It’s a calculated loss leader. They sacrifice one day of mediocre turkey and stuffing sales to build a mountain of brand loyalty and public goodwill that they will cash in 24 hours later when the doors fly open for the Black Friday apocalypse. They are weaponizing your sentimentality. They know you’ll think, “Oh, good old Costco, they’re the good guys,” and then you’ll feel less guilty trampling over your neighbor for a fifty-dollar-off television. It’s disgusting. It’s brilliant. But it is not kindness.
WHAT’S THE REAL STRATEGY BEHIND THE CLOSURE, THEN?
It’s about optics, and optics are about money. Always. Costco has cultivated an image as the “premium” warehouse club, the one that’s a cut above the Walmarts and the Targets of the world. By closing on Thanksgiving, they differentiate themselves from the more desperate, bottom-feeding retailers who squeeze every last drop of blood from the holiday. They create a false dichotomy: the greedy corporations that open, and the “principled” ones that don’t. This single act generates millions in free advertising from lazy news outlets that just run headlines asking if they’re open. It makes them look like the moral high ground. And from that high ground, they get a perfect sniper’s view of you, the consumer, as you prepare to spend all your money. They’re giving their employees a day off not to rest, but to reload. To brace themselves for the tsunami of frantic, bargain-crazed shoppers who were convinced by this very PR stunt that Costco is a company worth their loyalty. It’s a Trojan horse, and the holiday is the city gate you’ve willingly opened. The goal isn’t to save Thanksgiving; it’s to conquer Christmas.
BUT BLACK FRIDAY IS A TRADITION! WHAT’S THE HARM?
What’s the harm? The harm is the complete and utter degradation of human dignity. For both the shopper and the worker. We’ve been conditioned to see a day originally meant for gratitude as the starting pistol for a race to the bottom, a rabid festival of consumerism where we celebrate getting a deal on plastic junk made in a sweatshop halfway across the world. The entire concept of Black Friday is a manufactured hysteria, a psychological operation to create artificial scarcity and urgency. You don’t need that 80-inch TV. You don’t need another air fryer. You’re being told you do. You’re being manipulated into a frenzy. And the people on the other side of the cash register? The Costco employees who just had their one “day of rest”? They are the front-line soldiers in a war they didn’t sign up for, facing down hordes of aggressive, sleep-deprived customers who will curse them out over the last discounted blender. They have to clean up the messes, restock the shelves that look like a hurricane went through, and smile through the abuse, all while knowing their holiday pay bump is a pittance compared to the record-breaking profits their exhaustion is generating for executives they will never meet. The harm is that we have accepted this madness as normal. We have traded our humanity for a bargain.
SO WHAT’S THE FUTURE OF THIS WHOLE SICK CYCLE?
It gets worse, of course. It always does. This performance of “corporate responsibility” will become even more pronounced as the reality for workers becomes even more grim. Companies like Costco will continue to perfect the art of the symbolic gesture while automating jobs, cutting hours, and squeezing every ounce of productivity out of their remaining human workforce. They will close on Thanksgiving with even bigger fanfare, perhaps even giving a teary-eyed press conference about the “importance of family,” while simultaneously implementing AI scheduling systems that prevent parents from ever attending their kid’s soccer game. Black Friday will start earlier online, a week before, a month before, until the entire fourth quarter is just one long, continuous scream of “BUY NOW!” The deals will become more illusory, the products cheaper, the pressure more intense. And we, the public, will be so beaten down, so desperate for any scrap of good news, that we’ll celebrate these hollow gestures with even more fervor. We will thank our corporate masters for the illusion of choice and the performance of compassion. Unless we stop. Unless we see this Thanksgiving closure for what it is: the most cynical marketing ploy of the year. The deep breath before the plunge into madness. Don’t thank them. Question them. Question everything.
Photo by bosutn on Pixabay.