Last year around late summer, major retailers started announcing that they would be closed on Thanksgiving to give their employees a restful holiday with their families. After all, retail employees, especially at grocery stores, were dealing with thousands of people a day during a global pandemic. If anyone deserved a day off, it was them.

By October, the list of places committed to being closed that day had grown significantly. Just about every response I saw to the news was positive. You had people like myself who think these stores should be closed every year on Turkey Day, and many people who agreed that these workers had definitely earned at least Thanksgiving 2020 off.

Well, if you work at Target, I've got great news: You'll have Thanksgiving 2021 off too.

The company announced Wednesday that they will once again close on Thanksgiving, and while you'd hope the decision was entirely humanitarian, there is some sound financial reasoning behind it too.

According to a statement the company issued Wednesday, offering Black Friday deals across several days as part of their Cyber Week 2020 campaign resulted in a record high number of digital orders for Target. Many of those orders were delivered as part of Target's Drive Up and Order Pickup, and the company says one day in December saw the fulfillment of 6.5 million items - the most for a single day in the company's history.

Basically, Target adapted to how people were shopping during the pandemic and saw massive success.

Now that they know being closed on Thanksgiving isn't going to wreck the bottom line, they can give employees another day off.

I feel pretty confident that we'll see other companies making similar announcements soon. Some of them will do it because they feel confident it's a perfectly fine financial decision, and some might just want the good PR.

Either way, I love this. Maybe it's the start of a new tradition: letting people be home with their families on a holiday.

What a novel concept.

Kudos to Target for taking the lead on this one. Let's see whatcha got, Walmart and HEB?

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