One company has definitely benefited from the trend of retailers opening before dinner time on Thanksgiving Day: Boston Market, the restaurant chain that serves fast casual poultry and traditional side dishes year-round. The chain does plenty of rotisserie chicken and mashed potato business year-round and has always been a popular spot for quick dinners and catering on Thanksgiving, but its catering sales have increased for the last few years.

The company told CNN that on Thanksgiving 2013, it catered meals for about 362,000 people who are working at traditional mealtimes. These included people in traditional 365-days-per-year jobs like health care, hotel, and utility workers, and a growing number of big-box retailers including Walmart, Best Buy, and Target. A Boston Market executive credited the increase in business to “the new shopping trend” of opening earlier on Thanksgiving Day.

Boston Market says that it hires 2,000 seasonal workers for the peak poultry season of Thanksgiving through Christmas. This raises the inevitable question of what Boston Market feeds to its employees who are working through the holiday. We can make a few guesses, but they would probably prefer a pizza. The pizzeria, of course, could then order dinner for its employees from Boston Market in turn. I think that’s called “economic growth.”

Boston Market feeds over 300,000 Thanksgiving Day workers [CNN]

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