Minimum Wage, Minimum Effort: Thanksgiving Edition

Holidays, Karma/Comeuppance, Quitting, Retail, USA | Working | November 27, 2025

It is a month before Thanksgiving. The boss has sent a memo out to every worker in the store:

Memo: “[Company] has decided to enact a ‘Holiday Attendance Policy’ for Thanksgiving. We reserve the right to deny your time off requests. If you call in, it’s automatically a corrective action…”

The rest of it went on and on like that. I would have ignored it, but one of the lines caught my attention:

Memo: “Already approved TO requests are subject to being rescinded.”

I go and see my boss.

Me: “Boss, about that memo—”

Boss: “—I don’t want to hear it. You’re the fifth person to come to me with a complaint about this!”

Me: “It’s just, I already had Thanksgiving booked off and approved. The trip is booked and paid for.”

Boss: “I don’t know what to tell you. You read the new policy. There’s no guarantee that you’ll have your time off approved.”

Me: “Even though it was already approved?”

Boss: “That no longer applies.”

Me: “Okay, well, if my time off is denied, then I’ll just quit.”

Boss: “Ha ha, sure.”

Me: “You think I’m going to prioritize working my minimum-wage job at a store that will receive ten customers tops on Thanksgiving, over my first family vacation in almost a decade that I’ve already dropped $1,000 into?”

Boss: *Realizing I’m serious.* “I’ll… see what I can do.”

Me: “Thank you.”

The schedule for Thanksgiving comes around, and guess what? NO ONE has time off approved. The reasoning is that even though Thanksgiving is expected to be quiet, they need us all in to set up for Black Friday, the day before, which starts at MIDNIGHT.

I go into my boss’s office and hand in a pre-prepared resignation letter, as I had a feeling this would happen.

Boss: “Wait, you were serious?”

Me: “For $7.25 per hour, haha, sorry, but no.”

I turn around and walk out.

Boss: “Wait, you’re quitting now?!”

Me: “Remember how you always like to tell us that this is an at-will state, and we can be let go without a moment’s notice? Yeah, that works both ways.”

I later found out that of the ten employees who had their pre-approved Thanksgiving time off rescinded, ALL of them quit on the spot. [Boss] had to call in managers from other stores to cover, but they had staffing crises of their own due to the new policy.

From what I was told by some coworkers who still work there, the policy was gone by Christmas.