The holiday season, which has been ramping up into high gear even since before Thanksgiving and Black Friday, is an amazing and joyful time. The lights! The music! The gatherings! The food! But it is also a time full of contradictions. It is simultaneously the “most wonderful time of the year” and perhaps the most stressful. It is a time where we focus on expressing our love for one another and enjoying our respective faiths, and also a time where we grapple with the forces of commercialism that sometimes threaten to overshadow this message. There’s no getting around it – even though many of us are looking forward to taking some well-deserved time off these next couple of weeks, many industries (most notably, retail) are gearing up for the busiest part of their busy season! This inherently creates conflict, which generates (you guessed it) even more stress.

Indeed, many of us are now sharply focused on procuring the perfect gifts for family and friends, or are menu planning and ingredient shopping for our ultimate family get-together. But for many, our desire to consume and to enjoy some extra leisure time this season coincides with others having to forego their leisure in order to supply the goods and services to meet that outsized demand.

A recent article in Forbes highlighted this conflict, and the state of this conflict in the reality of 2022, by concluding “Nobody is winning”. So many of us, busy trying to nail down our last few year-end tasks before we head out for vacation, are demanding expanded hours and service offerings among brick-and-mortar retailers and the support infrastructure (like food service) that augment our frenetic shopping experiences. And yet, restaurants and retailers, still plagued by post-pandemic worker shortages, are finding it difficult to provide the expanded hours they may have offered a few years ago. Employees, it seems, aren’t simply yearning for pre-pandemic “normalcy” at all. Many are realizing that they don’t want to return to those old norms, instead preferring more flexible schedules that fit their newly-refined definitions of work/life balance.

I remember a quite different, yet in some ways eerily similar, conflict from my own experience several years back, working in the Marketing Department of a large retailer. At that time (long before any inkling of a pandemic), the industry trend was rapidly barreling towards being open more and more hours during Thanksgiving weekend. After years of Black Friday openings trending earlier and earlier in the morning, many big box mass merchandisers had by this point actually crossed the Rubicon and begun to open on Thanksgiving Day itself! While my company was not in the rarified top tier of retailers driving that trend, we were having very real internal debate regarding whether we needed to follow suit, in order to remain competitive. 

Our debates were grounded in our core values: While many felt it was unfair to ask our store-level employees to give up any part of their Thanksgiving celebrations, others pointed out that we were not serving the needs of our customers if we weren’t open for them, since the trends indicated that their demand for service during those hours was clearly there. And others still pointed out that, if we failed to remain competitive in the all-important four-day sales weekend, and our financials suffered as a result, this would ultimately be to the detriment of the very employees whose needs we were trying to serve. 

What is the right answer, here? I had a healthy respect for both sides of the debate, but I am happy that this trend seems to have reversed these many years later, and the pendulum has swung the other way. (Having nothing to do with pandemic-influenced trends.) Still, the inherent conflict between finding balance for ourselves and providing service to others, regardless of our industry, remains ever relevant.

As a consumer, I need to remind myself to be patient this year, despite the even greater-than-normal stresses this year’s holiday season threatens to unleash. I need to know that many restaurants and stores are open fewer hours than ever before, even though the workers inside are working more hours than they want. Indeed, whether I’m a frustrated customer or a frustrated worker, dealing with either side of this holiday season coin, I will try to remember to tap into the spirit of kindness and joy that the season was built upon, rather than letting the inevitable frustrations turn me into a Grinch and cause me to unleash my inner Scrooge at anyone I may encounter along the way.

On behalf of my colleagues at Labor Finders International, I want to wish you a joyous holiday season and a happy and successful New Year. Our mission every day is “Changing Lives Through Meaningful Employment and Partnerships”. And there’s no time of year when that’s more important than right now. 

Whatever you’re going to be. . . Be Outstanding!