In recent years, a number of retailers have gotten the bright idea to start the holiday shopping season on Thanksgiving night. In the process, they’ve effectively nuked a day that their employees should rightly be spending with their families. Well, one retailer has decided to buck that trend in a big way.
Late Tuesday, outdoor gear giant REI announced that it is not only keeping its doors closed on Black Friday, but is giving its 12,000 employees a paid vacation day. In a press release, REI said that rather than force its employees to endure the usual Black Friday rush, it wants to give them a chance to “do what they love most–be outside” and reconnect with their families and friends over the long weekend.
The company–the nation’s largest customer-owned cooperative–is going all-out with this effort. It has started a hashtag campaign, “#OptOutside.” It has also rolled out a section of its Website, optoutside.rei.com, to showcase its employees’ and members’ outdoor experiences during the holiday season. If you visit REI’s Website on Black Friday, you’ll be greeted with a black takeover screen urging you to “OptOutside.”
REI is taking a calculated risk with this move. Typically, Black Friday is one of the chain’s 10 biggest shopping days. But for president and CEO Jody Stritzke, keeping REI’s stores and warehouses closed on Black Friday was an easy call.
“As a member-owned co-op, our definition of success goes beyond money. We believe that a life lived outdoors is a life well lived and we aspire to be stewards of our great outdoors. We think that Black Friday has gotten out of hand and so we are choosing to invest in helping people get outside with loved ones this holiday season, over spending it in the aisles.”
Stritzke went further the next day in an interview on “CBS This Morning.” Watch here.
As Stritzke sees it, REI is being true to its status as an outdoor retailer by encouraging people to get outside. He said that nine months ago, he asked his leadership team to come up with “something authentic”–and this was the result.
Any doubt that this was the right call was eliminated when NBC spoke with one of REI’s employees. He said that he hadn’t had Black Friday off in 12 years–since he was in high school. I wonder how many of those years were spent standing at the door at the crack of dawn with a crush of people waiting for the doors to open.
In a day and age when it seems more and more retailers are putting profits over their employees’ families, REI deserves to be heartily applauded. Let’s hope others take a hint and encourage their employees and customers to opt outside on Thanksgiving weekend.
