You can fight the crowds at Black Friday sales today at Walmart without fear of fighting union thugs intent on making pests of themselves.  After years of pointless protests aimed at unionizing Walmart, the great white whale – the largest private employer in  the country – obsessively targeted by the union bosses, they have stopped doubling down on stupid.  (On this issue, that is.  The $15 minimum wage that would cost many low-paid workers their jobs remains their pipe dream.)  Sean Higgins reports in the Examiner:

Unions have stopped trying to use Walmart's day-after-Thanksgiving 'Black Friday' sales to launch public relations blitzes against the corporation, effectively conceding that the once-high profile efforts were making little headway toward organizing a union at the nation's largest employer.

"We actually don't have any events planned for Black Friday," said Amy Ritter, spokeswoman for Making Change at Walmart, a nonprofit activist group funded and run by the United Food and Commercial Workers.

That was then (2013):

This is now:

Evidently, the bosses have noticed that online retailing is stealing away customers from brick-and-mortar stores, so ramping up labor costs would lead to store closings.  Perhaps they have learned from the spectacle of the destruction of a majority of union jobs in the steel, automobile, and other industries, as unions extracted more and more from a shrinking pie and non-union competitors leaped into the breach.

One more reason the be thankful.