End the War -- on Thanksgiving

Yep, those football games are essential. Have to have them.

Your phony labor-advocate routine seems to reach a limit when it comes to sports and entertainment. What about college football players? Aren't they being exploited during the holidays? Maybe you should demand to not cover college sports during holidays at the Daily Bugle.

 

Well, the two biggest shopping days of the year are the day after Thanksgiving and the day after Christmas. Stores are already losing quite a bit of business to the Amazons or the online shopping, which usually have special deals that have quite a few people making online purchases on Thanksgiving.

They're looking for something that will give them an edge over the other stores and this will do it.

I have no doubts that in a lot of houses, as the guys go watch football after the meal the women will be heading to Macy's, which is far favorable to dealing with any of the Black Friday crap.

This will be incredibly successful and stores will be forced to follow suit to keep up.

 

New person gets hired at my job:

Him: So do we get Christmas and Thanksgiving off?
Me: What days off did you get when you bid?
Him: Monday-Tuesday
Me: Does Christmas or Thanksgiving fall on a Monday or Tuesday?
(checks calendar in phone)
Him: No.
Me: Then you're working.

 

Successful in terms of getting TV coverage of frenzied shoppers on the 11 o'clock local news? Sure. In terms of real sales, I dunno. To my mind, the market for these gimmicks are the customers of the discount chain giants, not the Macy's of the world. For Wal-Mart, it might work, but think about what's for sale at Macy's. It's not merchandise suitable for gimmick marketing.
Want to end Thanksgiving Day shopping? Have the retail industry unionized. I never minded covering high school football on Thanksgiving because that was a time and a half holiday in the Herald-Guild contract.

 

Or the dishes, for that matter ...

 

Um, you do know there's more news than just football games on a holiday, don't you? There are fires, murders, car accidents, blizzards and other things to cover. Or on your planet, everything stops except for football games.

Plus, if pro football teams don't want to play on the holidays, they have a union that can advocate for them and negotiate on playing on the holidays. If the NFLPA truly wanted to, they could put holiday games on the negotiating table, either for additional pay or other compensation.

College football player explotiation is another issue, although during the bowl season, they do actually receive some gifts that they don't receive during the regular season. Which is why the student-athlete amateurs should unionize themselves. Dave Meggysey pointed out that when Syracuse got "invited" to the Liberty Bowl, then in Philly, the players saw the coaches were receiving gifts, but the players had to spend an extra couple of weeks at practice during the holidays. The players threatened to boycott unless they got the gifts, which they did.

 

Honest question, if one of your clients calls you on a holiday because their coffee machine broke and they need to serve their customers their coffee, do you go in? And if you do, are you charging them extra for the holiday?

 

One of many things I honestly don't miss about the newspaper biz.

 

My first year in the business, I was in the office on Thanksgiving. We usually had one general assignment guy who would have to come into the office every night (this is back when papers had a decent-sized staff) and you would essentially do busy work and if there was some kind of local news that broke that didn't fall to a specific beat, you'd cover it. About half the time, it was a very easy shift.

We had a smaller sports staff in the office that night, which would probably be huge by today's standards. One chief, two copy editors, two slots, maybe an agate guy or two.

The whole rest of the paper had one person in the office. Everything else had been put to bed, and she was there "just in case" something happened.

She was scared shitless. When she went to lunch, our copy chief called me over and said, "When she gets back, go over there and tell her you heard about a shooting on the police scanner." I laughed, but I refused to do it. I figured it was just too mean. He tried to get one of the agate guys to do it and they refused as well...

 

Makes me want to move to a communist country, if there are any left.

 

Why don't these fuckers go online only for the holidays? If it's good enough for newspapers, it's got to be good enough for them. Just put a big sign out front that says "visit our website and place your order".

(and we wonder why unemployment is so high)

 

On Thanksgiving or Christmas, no one is getting service. Same with New Yea'rs Day, 4th of July, Easter.

On a day like Memorial Day or Labor Day, if it's close, I'm not busy, and they really want service, then they are paying double time.

The Friday after Thanksgiving they are paying either time and a half, or double time. Depends on the customer, and how willing I am to go out there.