Walgreens closed Thanksgiving Day (24 hour stores still open)

[storewanderer]

Walgreens is closing Thanksgiving Day and paying employees who were scheduled to work that day (in addition to holiday pay). This is pretty interesting.

The 24 hour store employees working will receive $100 gift cards and the company will pay the associated employee portion of the income taxes with that compensation.

[Super S]

This is an interesting move. Walgreens is one of those chains that has almost always been open on major holidays. Gotta wonder if theft is a factor here. Or if business has just slowed down so much that some locations just aren't worth opening for the day.

It will also be interesting to see what they do over Christmas.

Over the last few years though, it seems like a lot of retailers are shifting back toward being closed altogether on Thanksgiving and Christmas, or reducing the hours they are open considerably.

[Alpha8472]

Thanksgiving Day has been slow since COVID. Several years ago Walmart and other stores were open Thanksgiving all day and night. This was due to customers getting trampled to death on Black Friday morning waiting for the doors to open.

Customers and employees want to stay home now and relax on Thanksgiving. They compared the costs of opening and staffing stores on Thanksgiving. The sales were not enough to make that much more profit.

However, if employees are forced to work on Thanksgiving most will either call in sick or quit. Walgreens is such a miserable place to work at that Walgreens needs to keep as many employees as they can. It is very difficult to keep employees these days.

Employees are no longer mindless slaves to be worked to death. You have to treat them right and let them have a day off twice a year. Then you can retain your employees instead of having to spend money to keep training replacements all the time.

[storewanderer]

What is interesting here is they will still pay the employees if they had already scheduled them to work, plus pay regularly scheduled holiday pay. This would seem to imply that this was not a profitable sales day for them and it is cheaper to close and pay the employees.

Or employee morale is so bad they are desperate to do something, anything, to try and make the employees happy. I expect a lot of employees will be happy about this.

However they did come out and say they WILL be open Christmas Day. I would have liked to see a similar policy for Christmas Day.

I think it is reasonable for limited locations to be open Thanksgiving Day and Christmas Day (such as the 24 hour stores) staffed by volunteers from surrounding stores.

[Super S]

What is interesting here is they will still pay the employees if they had already scheduled them to work, plus pay regularly scheduled holiday pay. This would seem to imply that this was not a profitable sales day for them and it is cheaper to close and pay the employees.

Or employee morale is so bad they are desperate to do something, anything, to try and make the employees happy. I expect a lot of employees will be happy about this.

However they did come out and say they WILL be open Christmas Day. I would have liked to see a similar policy for Christmas Day.

I think it is reasonable for limited locations to be open Thanksgiving Day and Christmas Day (such as the 24 hour stores) staffed by volunteers from surrounding stores.

I agree that LIMITED locations should be open with limited hours. People do get sick and need medications etc. regardless of what day it is. My nephew actually got sick one year when we went to visit the Peacock Lane light display in Portland on Christmas Day, and the nearby Walgreens was open so we could get some medication for him

But having ALL stores open on Christmas never made sense and screams greed more than anything else. They should handle Christmas the same way they are handling Thanksgiving, Christmas is actually a more important holiday to many people.

There still are some retailers which treat Thanksgiving like just a regular day and do not offer any special pay and expect people to work. Hopefully the actions of the chains that are backing off of being open are influencing those to treat employees fairly.

[storewanderer]

Target and Wal Mart have drawn the line and will not open on Thanksgiving again. I am glad the days of malls opening at 6 PM or whatever on Thanksgiving are over.

Walgreens decision is unclear if this is just a one time thing or what. Maybe they don't know.