It’s Black Friday selling season, making it also Black...

It’s Black Friday selling season, making it also Black Friday petition season at Change.org, whose online tool enables its 45 million users to post petitions about causes important to them. As of Monday afternoon, 15,348 users had signed a petition posted by Patricia Stumpff of Dayton, Ohio, asking Target to “keep all stores closed on Thanksgiving Day and to open the stores for Black Friday at a reasonable hour” so consumers “can be together with their family and friends on Thanksgiving.” Defining a holiday as “a day set aside by custom or by law, in which normal activities, especially business or work, are to be suspended or reduced,” Stumpff said Thanksgiving Day is a federal holiday and Target “should recognize it too.” A spokeswoman for Change.org told us the Thanksgiving shopping issue has been a lightning rod for the past two years. In 2011, Anthony Hardwick, a Target employee from Omaha, Neb., gathered 200,647 signatures on his Change.org petition when the company announced it planned to open at midnight on Thanksgiving for the first time, the spokeswoman said. That petition inspired more than 150 other petitions from across the country urging other retailers to “Save Thanksgiving,” she said. When Target announced last year that it would open even earlier, at 9 p.m. on Thanksgiving night, Casey St. Clair, a Target employee from Corona, Calif., gathered 376,836 signatures on her Change.org petition, the spokeswoman said. That campaign inspired more than 160 other petitions to retailers. Target didn’t immediately comment on complaints about Thanksgiving hours or whether any number of signatures would cause it to reconsider opening stores on Thanksgiving. The Change.org spokeswoman said the organization doesn’t limit the number of petitions on a given issue. “Given the number of petitions launched and signed around the ‘Black Friday creep’ the past two years,” she said, “we expect to continue to see new petitions created” as Thanksgiving approaches. New petitions related to Thanksgiving and Black Friday are hitting Change.org “almost every day,” she said. As of Monday afternoon, 17 petitions on the subject had amassed 19,322 signatures. Thanksgiving/Black Friday petitions can be monitored at http://chn.ge/16tfjrj.