Advertisement
If You’re Not Closed On Christmas Day, You’re Really a 1 Percenter
Get articles like this
in your inbox
The longest running and most trusted source of information serving talent acquisition professionals.
Advertisement
Related Articles
If Ebenezer Scrooge were alive today, he’d be in the 1 percent.
No, not THAT 1 percent, although he’d undoubtedly be among that much-maligned group of rich people, too. The 1 percent in this case refers to the firms and businesses that will be open Christmas Day.
SHRM has been polling businesses on their holiday closing plans for several years now, with fairly consistent results for most of the big ones – New Year’s, Memorial Day, Independence Day, Labor Day, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. Except for a peculiar little blip in 2011, when 6 percent of businesses said they’d keep their doors open, Christmas is traditionally the one holiday when when most businesses will close.
Next month and in 2013, 99 percent of businesses say they’ll be closed Christmas Day.
Thanksgiving comes close in terms of closures; 98 percent of businesses expect to be closed this Thanksgiving, and 99 percent expect to close that day in 2013. On the other hand, anyone checking the ads could be forgiven for thinking every retailer in the country will open before the turkey is out of the oven.
But only 5 percent of the respondents to the 2012 and 2013 holiday polls are retailers. Plus, even though they are pushing up opening times from dawn to 4 a.m. and even earlier, most still won’t throw open their doors and jump out of the way until it is officially Friday. Thus the SHRM poll found 27 percent of businesses in the U.S. will open the day after Thanksgiving, which we all know as Black Friday.
For 12 percent of the businesses, the week between December 25 and January 1 is a holiday.
In releasing its survey of 2013’s holiday closing plans, the Society for Human Resource Management observed that far fewer businesses will close for any religious holiday other than Christmas, adding fuel to the continuing debate about whether Dec. 25 is becoming a sort of secular holiday.
“Instead of structuring their holiday calendar around specific religious holidays, many companies encourage their employees to observe days of religious or other special significance through paid time off, vacation, personal leave or floating holidays,” said Shawn Fegley, survey research analyst at SHRM.
According to SHRM’s 2012 Employee Benefits research report, 51 percent of organizations provide a PTO plan; 43 percent provide a stand-alone paid vacation plan; 40 percent offer paid floating holidays, and; 26 percent provide paid personal days.