Are You Even Paying Attention?
Do you see the headlines? Do you see them screaming at you from your phone? ‘What’s open on Thanksgiving?’ It sounds so innocent. So helpful. But it’s not. It’s a symptom of the disease. It’s the final, wheezing cough of a society that has sold its soul for the convenience of buying a forgotten stick of butter at 7 PM on a day that used to mean something. Used to be sacred. And you’re just searching ‘grocery near me’ like a zombie while the whole structure burns down around you. This isn’t about planning. This is about the complete and utter collapse of boundaries, of tradition, of the very idea that people deserve a single day off.
So, You Forgot Something?
And what does that mean, really? You forgot the whipped cream. You forgot the onions. So the system bends to your forgetfulness. An entire infrastructure of logistics, of underpaid stockers, of exhausted cashiers who haven’t seen their own families since dawn has to grind on because you couldn’t make a proper list. It’s the pinnacle of entitlement. Because for decades, if you forgot something, you dealt with it. You adapted. You made do. It was a funny story you told later. But now? Now it’s a crisis that requires a minimum-wage worker to sacrifice their holiday. This isn’t a service; it’s a surrender. We have surrendered the last bastion of communal rest to the god of perpetual commerce. And it’s a god that demands a human sacrifice, and the sacrifice is the family dinner of the person scanning your items.
Do You Understand the Slippery Slope You’re On?
Because this is how it starts. First, it’s just a few grocery stores. ‘For emergencies,’ they say. Then it’s the big box stores, luring you in with ‘Pre-Black Friday’ deals that are really just ‘Thanksgiving Day’ deals. They’ve rebranded the holiday itself into a shopping event. Thanksgiving is no longer the main course; it’s the appetizer for the real feast: Black Friday. Soon, Christmas will be the same. Easter will have doorbuster deals on pastel-colored televisions. The Fourth of July will be about buying mattresses, not celebrating independence. There will be no more breaks. No more punctuation in the endless, run-on sentence of consumerism. And you’re cheering it on with every last-minute trip you make.
But What About The Workers? Oh, You Forgot Them Too.
Let’s be brutally honest. Nobody is volunteering for the Thanksgiving shift. Nobody. They are being forced. Forced by economic necessity, by managers who hold their hours over their heads, by a corporate culture that sees them not as people with families and traditions, but as cogs in a machine that must never, ever stop churning out profits. They smile at you from behind the register, wishing you a ‘Happy Thanksgiving,’ and the bitter irony is so thick it could choke you. They are facilitating your perfect family memory while their own is being stolen from them, minute by minute, transaction by transaction. And every dollar you spend in that store on that day is a vote. It’s a vote to continue this madness. It’s a vote to say that their family time is less valuable than your convenience. It’s a sick, twisted transaction that goes far beyond the price on the receipt.
This is a National Security Threat. No, I’m Not Kidding.
Think bigger. Think about the system itself. What does it say about our society when we have zero resilience? We have created a population so dependent on immediate gratification that the thought of a single 24-hour period of commercial shutdown sends people into a panic. The supply chain is already stretched to a breaking point. We see it every time there’s a storm or a minor disruption. It’s a fragile, brittle thing. And our response is to stretch it even further? To demand it perform flawlessly on a day when it, too, should be resting and resetting? It’s insane. We are building a glass house and throwing stones at it for fun. Because one day, there will be a real crisis. A massive power outage. A transportation shutdown. A real emergency. And everyone will have been trained to expect the shelves to be magically full, the stores to be open, the system to cater to them. But the system will be broken. Because the people who run it will be as burned out and broken as the rest of us. We are eroding our own ability to cope with hardship, one ’emergency’ grocery run at a time.
Remember When a Day Off Was a Day Off?
There was a time, not so long ago, that the silence of a holiday was the point. The quiet streets. The closed doors. It forced you to be with family, or with friends, or alone with your thoughts. It forced you to plan ahead. It demanded a level of personal responsibility. That silence, that ‘inconvenience,’ was a feature, not a bug. It was the national exhale. A collective pause. But we can’t handle silence anymore, can we? The hum of the cash register and the beep of the scanner are the new sounds of the holiday. We have replaced peace with productivity, rest with retail. And we are weaker for it. So much weaker. This isn’t just about Thanksgiving 2025. It’s about every single day after. It’s about the slow, agonizing death of downtime itself. So by all means, google ‘what’s open’. Find your store. Get your forgotten supplies. Just know what you’re really buying.
