Oh, Walmart.  How did you become so successful while seemingly everyone hates your guts?  Walmart gets roasted for implementing employee policies that are routine among so many businesses across the country.  So it’s no surprise that the anti-Walmart battalions are out to protest the store for asking its workers to come in on Thanksgiving and Christmas.

My very first reaction to this was “Well, wait, aren’t there a ton of businesses open on holidays?”  Many people work on holidays as it is.  And these people get over it and their lives go on.  Now don’t get me wrong, if my boss came to me and said that I had to work on Thanksgiving this year, I wouldn’t exactly be happy about it.  And would I make a video about it?  Mmm…no.  But some people did.  And we get to watch it.

Before we talk about anything else, one thing about this video really struck me.  If these people are being completely honest and not fabricating or exaggerating anything, Walmart seems like a pretty awful place to work.  If I had to work at a place like that, I’d be out the door and to another job so quickly you’d think I were OJ Simpson with a police car chasing after me.  There were numerous people starting out their lines with “I’m so sick of…” and one person even said he wasn’t being treated like a human being.  Then why aren’t you looking for another job?

But hey, I’ll be fair.  Maybe some people are looking for another job.  And maybe some of these people can’t find different work.  To these people, I’d be careful if I were in their shoes.  Working on a holiday stinks, but is it worth it to lose your job over if that’s the only job you can get?  If you want to walk out on your job, that’s up to you, but just realize there are a lot of people out there who would do anything to get any sort of job, including the one you just walked out on.

The best thing to do is to make yourself so valuable as an employee that your company cannot afford to lose you.  They’ll be more likely to try to keep you around and they might even give you off on days like Thanksgiving to keep you happy.  It’s difficult in a low-skilled labor position like many at Walmart, but there are plenty of people who started at the bottom of a company and then went on to enjoy successful careers.

Finally, who is really to blame for making these people work on holidays?  It’s the shoppers!  If no one were coming out on these days, there’d be no reason for Walmart to make sure they had a full workforce to cover them.