Garth Meyer

This week Macy’s, Target, J.C. Penney, Sears, Best Buy and other retailers annnounced plans to open earlier on Thanksgiving Day. Last year was the first time in history that mainline stores opened on the holiday.

With all of these chains competing with each other, if one is open the others have to be too. Or do they?

There seems to be some missed opportunity in all of this.

What if one big store just stayed closed?

The sheer public relations benefit in being the high-profile store that says “no” would be worth it, likely in spades. They’d essentially be saying, “We’re confident enough in our business that we think we can do well enough in 363 days per year what our competititors can do in 363.5. In the process, we honor the quintessential American holiday based on being thankful.”

Goodwill from that would come back to them throughout the year.

How could it not?

There are enough people in the world that still embrace that basic sense of class, even if they’re 15 years old. This is not a function of age.

As Steve Jobs once said about Microsoft, “The trouble with Microsoft is they have no taste. They have absolutely no taste.”

While his exuberance could have been kept in check, when Apple went through its dark days in the mid-’90s it stayed alive largely because it did have taste. People always liked them. They didn’t want to see them go.

Similarly, people would just like a store that let Thanksgiving have its moment.

Aside from that, for another opportunity, what about a message from the top? This is a signature American holiday getting a tire-track across it. Might the president have something to say?

Not that the executive branch can singlehandedly tell the commerce machine to be happy with your previous 363.0 days of annual retail time, but if he did, how could anyone disagree with his point?

It would be the safest controversial statement a president could ever make.

Sure, in this atmosphere, if President Obama did say something, people would laugh when Best Buy doesn’t heed his advice. But the point is to say something.

Maybe if it was said well enough, people would laugh not at the president, but at Best Buy.

Garth Meyer

Gazette reporter