The biggest shopping mall in America is sending an interesting message to customers this Thanksgiving: Stay home with your families. For the first time ever, the massive mall in Minnesota is closing on Thanksgiving, a day that has increasingly become a busy shopping day at stores around the country.
One of the mall’s VPs explained to the state’s StarTribune, “We’ve been talking about this for months, looking at the numbers, looking at the pros and the cons. We’re excited to give this day back to our employees so they can celebrate with their families.”
Instead of encouraging customers to shop on a holiday, there asking them to come on Black Friday, which means 1,200 people employed by the Mall of America can actually be home with family on Thanksgiving day. They aren’t opening until 5 a.m. on Friday. In years past, they stayed opened all night.
The mall is giving individual stores the option to open, though they don’t think many actually will because the mall itself won’t be staffed. That means, up to 13,000 people who work at the more than 500 stores won’t have to work on a holiday this year.
