NEWS: Corporate America Says No Thanks, No Giving

CSX profits going through the roof.

Nothing to correct. You explained it perfectly. What I will add is that yes, we get 8 hours pay for showing up. That means that if I as a conductor come in to work and they are short an engineer and I can't do my job I go home with a days pay for fulfilling my obligation to the carrier. I was available, willing and ready to work.

Likewise, if I come in and they don't have 8 hours worth of work for me, I'm not getting screwed by the company and paid only two hours for two hours work. And believe me they would love to do that. Again I showed up, I did what was asked of me, and I have a contract that says I get paid 8 hours minimum for that.

If you want to bash unions feel free to do so, but in the end all you are doing is letting corporations treat you like a whore otherwise. They'll use you for their needs and dump you off when they have no use for you.

One of the things I find most telling is that the companies with the most to lose by closing for a day, the mom and pop shops and restaurants and so forth in my neighborhood, are the ones closed today and not doing outrageous marketing stunts tomorrow. It's only the national corporations that feel the need to start the shopping season the minute dinner is over.

So it was 6am when I was at Old Navy two or three years ago. It's midnight now. Any guesses pn whether there's a limit on pushing up Black Friday or have we hit an equilibrium?

Confession: I stopped to get gas this morning on the way to Grandma's. Though I resisted the urge to go in and buy a drink.

If you don't support trier view... Don't spend your $$ there!!!!!

Living in Minnesota there are a lot of Best Buy stores. I drove by three of them on my way home the parking lots in all of them were jam packed, and there were lines all the way around each store. The people have spoken, they don't give a shit about retail slaves and their holidays. End of story.

Turns out Americans are assholes when 3rd tier useless crap goes on sale.

I think I read that on a T-shirt

Thanks for reminding me why I celebrate Buy Nothing Day every year.

You like meaningless gestures?

Woman uses pepper spray in Walmart to keep other people away from the cheap crap she wanted

It was just a vegetable, essentially.

I heard this this morning on the radio. All I could think of was "what the fuck?"

And a lot more people can't afford to spend all goddamned night shopping for deals on oversized flat-panel LCD TVs. Call me nuts, but I'm siding with the employees who have to give up their holiday time because Target needs to make a few more bucks off of spend-zombies who honestly think that lining up outside a store waiting for it to open at midnight so they can trample one another trying to get to the lastest videogame system being sold for a couple bucks cheaper than it sold for the day before (and no cheaper than it'll be sold for the day after) is a normal, okay thing to do.

I'm pretty gainfully employed, thankfully, and I still can't afford to stay up all night on a spending rampage. What's falling on deaf ears on this end is the argument that this is something employees of Target/Best Buy/Wal-Mart/etc. have no right to be complaining about because the economy's bad and, you know, at least you have a job and it's not like the store could just open at 4AM like it did last year so you could maybe get in a little time with your family before having to go to bed to rest up a tiny bit before your shift.

For the record: the Target employee who delivered that petition to corporate headquarters on Monday? He was scheduled for a 4AM to 10AM shift on Thanksgiving and then had to be back at Target by 11PM to start the 12AM Friday shift, and he's getting paid $0.25 more an hour than I did working for Target in the exact same position and in the exact same regional market a full decade ago. I'd be curious to know how many of you "these whiners should be thankful that they have a job at all!" types are working double overnight shifts on holidays for just a hair over the federal minimum wage.

I'm not saying they don't have a right to complain. And there's evidence, at least around here, that the midnight opening might not really have had much effect--the store I work at did maybe $10k more than last year's Black Friday despite opening six hours earlier this year. There's a lot that goes into that, though; for instance, we had a spending bump a while back that indicated that a fair portion of middle America ran out of savings and switched over to credit cards. That's not something that's going to last very long, so for all I know that $10k might represent a significant increase in revenue in comparison to spending potential.

But, yeah, it does suck, and I'm not denying that. Most of our employees over 18 had to work split shifts, usually 6-7 hours and 6-7 hours with a 5-6 hour break in between. Attempts were made at compensation for this; the store spent a few hundred bucks on food--pizza and subs, wings, cereal and bagels for the morning, Red Bull available all day--so that most employees didn't have to go out to eat or pack a lunch. Food was provided for today's shifts as well (Black Saturday is about half a Black Friday, and together they represent well over a normal week's worth of revenue). Our regional manager and his staff went store to store keeping an eye on things in the district.

However... we are in a slump. Jobs, and hours at jobs, are scarce. We cut a lot of shifts during the past month because there were so few customers in the store. That doesn't cancel out the complaints, but it's something that has a bearing when considering the situation.

Honestly, the guys who really get shafted aren't the hourly employees--it's the salaried store management. They work longer hours than almost any other employee, and they don't get overtime.