Thanksgiving Day a.k.a. "Brown Thursday" underway for retailers

MYRTLE BEACH, SC (WMBF) - After you've cooked, eaten, watched football and napped, you may start thinking about your shopping plan for Black Friday, one of the biggest shopping days all year. But many places are actually opening on Thanksgiving Day in 2015.

Bass Pro Shops actually opened at 8 a.m. Thursday morning, a tradition that has lasted for the last 40 years.

Best Buy is opening at 5 p.m, where people at the Coastal Grand Mall location have been waiting for days to get inside. Most big-name retailers whose store hours for Black Friday actually start Thursday, will open to the masses at 6 p.m.: Walmart, K-Mart, Target, Sears, Kohl's, Staples, and the Tanger Outlets locations and more.

Coastal Grand Mall will open at 6 this evening as well, but it's up to individual stores whether they open.

If there are other store hours you're curious about, you can check that store website, and in many cases their Black Friday hours are the first thing you'll see.

Thursday kicks off the biggest shopping month of the year, and from big-box stores to small local businesses, it's a crucial time of year to bring in shoppers.

There's a growing contingency of people against the whole idea of "Brown Thursday," though. They believe Thanksgiving is meant for family, and it's a movement a lot of big-name retailers are starting to get behind.

One Facebook group called Boycott Black Thursday has more than 140,000 likes. It uses the hashtag #KeepFamilyFirst, and urges people to boycott retailers that extend Black Friday sales into Thanksgiving. Many retailers have jumped on board, saying they want to let their employees enjoy the holiday with their family.

Those stores include Nordstrom, Dillards, TJ-Maxx, Marshalls, Pier 1, Pet Co and Petsmart, among others.

Even local business owners I spoke with say while the income from the holiday shopping season is crucial, you won't find them opening on Thanksgiving Day.

"You know we are local, I want to give my employees the day off," said Daniel Brass, owner of Black Dog Running Company. "To rest and recover, and give thanks. So, I don't think there's a real advantage of opening on Thanksgiving. I think it turns a certain segment of people off. There's always going to be people that want to go at the crack of dawn and want to go at midnight, go shopping... But we focus more on the weekend after."

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