What?? KMart's Closed on Christmas???

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Carts are empty at KMart

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uploaded by Sondra Lowell

One of the most popular Google searches this Christmas Day is “stores open on Christmas.” Yet a good, all-purpose department store is one of the least likely establishments to be open, just when you need it most.

Sure, there’s Walgreens and CVS, where you can pick up a few toys, the odd (hopefully not too odd) small kitchen appliance and drawstring pants. You can even gift wrap a nice assortment of cosmetics for the ladies and metrosexuals , hand/ankle/neck braces for athletically inclined relatives and generic acid reducers for GERD sufferers on your list. But even a well-stocked, department store-ish drugstore is not sufficient for those who've already put “STOP PROCRASTINATING” at the top of their New Year’s resolutions.

It wasn’t so long ago that all mainstream store were closed on all major holidays, and the Thanksgiving barrier was not broken till the beginning of this century (afaik) by the low-end yet dependable KMart.

Wrote elena_398 on a gottadeal.com forum in 2005, “Kmart on Thanksgiving opens up at 6am here by me. I get in line by 4-5am. Usually within the first 10 people or so. Get done by 7am. Come home, make my usual Holiday breakfast (every holiday I make a big breakfast for the family) then get to work on Thanksgiving dinner.”

Now there’s a woman who knows how to celebrate a holiday. Too bad she doesn’t have the chance put those organizational skills to use on the most shopping intensive celebration of them all.

Blogger Hilary Shepherd turned the whole web-o-sphere on its head by erroneously posting that Kmart and Best Buy would be open today. Hopefully, the last minute shoppers Hilary unleashed on shopping center parking lots at 4 am (elena_398, you can go home now) got chain stores thinking how they can turn around the economy, without government handouts, on Christmas 2010.

Yes, we’ve got 24 hour virtual shopping, complete with sales and coupons and rebates, at countless .coms, and you’d think that would be enough. But you can’t download a doll or a bicycle, and those procrastinators whose 2009 resolution didn’t pan out will miss out once again on the true meaning of Christmas, the joy of giving…at the last minute.