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Monday, September 1, 2025, is Labor Day, which is one of 12 official federal holidays in the United States. The day is observed on the first Monday of every September. Labor Day celebrates the labor movement in the United States and the contributions that workers of all stripes make to the country, to companies, and to the economy. It recognizes that America would not be the economic powerhouse that it is without the average worker. However, in recent decades, Labor Days original purpose of celebrating Americas workforce has taken a back seat to commerce. Retailers often hold significant sales on Labor Day, with many choosing to remain open instead of closing for the holiday. Labor Day is also seen as the unofficial end to summer and the beginning of fall. As for what is open and what is closed on Labor Day 2025, heres what you need to know. Is Labor Day a federal holiday? Yes. Labor Day is a federal holiday in the United States. It is one of the 12 federal holidays recognized by the U.S. government in 2025 (the previous being Independence Day on July 4 and the next being Columbus Day on October 13). Since Labor Day is a federal holiday, many government institutions and offices will be closed for the day. However, other businesses may be open. Are banks open on Labor Day? No. Most banks will be closed on Labor Day as banks choose to observe federal holidays. This includes banks like Chase, Citi, PNC, Wells Fargo, and more. However, while bank branches will be closed, online banking services will be operating as normal. Are ATMs open on Labor Day? Yes, ATMs will continue to operate as normal on Labor Day. However, if you are going to need cash, it may be best to go to an ATM sooner rather than later. This is because on holiday weekends, ATMs tend to be used more heavily by those needing cash, so their internal cash reserves may get depleted faster than normal. Is the post office open on Labor Day? No. The United States Postal Service (USPS) is closed on Labor Day. As a federal organization, the USPS observes federal holidays and closes its postal branches. Is mail delivered on Labor Day? No. The United States Postal Service (USPS) wont be making mail deliveries on Labor Day. Are FedEx and UPS operating on Labor Day? Many FedEx services will be closed on Labor Day, according to the companys holiday schedule. This includes most FedEx locations as well as FedEx Freight. The company also says it will have modified FedEx Office services. However, its FedEx Custom Critical services will be running as normal. UPS says it will have no pickup or delivery services on Labor Day, but its UPS Express Critical service will be operating as normal. The company also says its UPS stores may be closed, but its best to check with the location near you to see if it will have modified hours. Is the U.S. stock market open on Labor Day? No. U.S. stock markets will be closed on Labor Day. This includes the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) and the Nasdaq. However, international stock markets will remain open, barring any public holidays in their respective countries today. Are schools open on Labor Day? No. Public schools in the United States will be closed on Labor Day. Most private schools should be closed as well. Are restaurants open on Labor Day? Expect nearly all chain fast food establishments and restaurants to remain open. This includes establishments such as McDonalds, Taco Bell, Chipotle, Burger King, and others. However, many chains operate on a franchise model, allowing the franchisees to set their own opening hours. Its possible then that some franchise-owned stores may be closed. Are retail stores open on Labor Day? Nearly every big-box retailer will be open on Labor Day. This includes Best Buy, Target, Home Depot, Lowe’s, and Walmart. However, there is one major omission from the list of open retailers: Costco. The warehouse goods giant will be closed on Labor Day, according to the companys holiday schedule. Are pharmacies open on Labor Day? Most chain pharmacies, including Walgreens and CVS, are expected to be open on Labor Day. However, it’s a good idea to check your local location to see if it will have modified hours. Similarly, smaller privately owned pharmacies may be closed, so its best to plan ahead. Are grocery stores open on Labor Day? Yes, most regional grocery stores are expected to be open on Labor Day. This includes Kroger, Whole Foods, Trader Joe’s, Aldi, and more. However, some locations may have altered schedules on Labor Day, so it’s best to call ahead to confirm the stores hours on Monday.
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E-Commerce
Assertiveness, dominance, competition, risk-taking: these are the hallmarks of traditional leadership models, and theyre overwhelmingly associated with men. From corporate boardrooms to political offices, the archetype of a strong leader has been built around commanding voices, hardliner decisions, and lone-wolf thinking. This framing isnt just outdated: its dangerous. The traits weve long sidelinedcompassion, collaboration, long-term thinking, humilityare no longer soft skills. Theyre survival skills. And theyre overwhelmingly found in what are often called feminine leadership styles. In fact, businesses with gender-diverse executive teams are 25% more likely to outperform financially, and companies led by women CEOs have historically delivered around 223% return on equity over 10 years, versus 130% for companies led by men. Alternatively, Gallup research indicates that employee performance can drop by up to 30% under authoritarian or top-down management. Its clear that aggressive leadership styles are not working, and that inclusive, emotionally intelligent leadership must be embraced by organizations that want to achieve greater success and longevity. But there are other leadership styles that are redefining what effective leadership looks like. Collaborative Leadership: Power With, Not Power Over Aggressive leadership thrives on control: the leader speaks, others listen. But in a world where the best solutions come from diverse voices and interdisciplinary teams, this model falls short. Collaboration isnt just a buzzwordits a prerequisite for success. Consider the turnaround of Korean Air in the 1990s. Plagued by fatal crashes, the airline discovered that junior crew members were too deferential to challenge their captainsa cultural deference to hierarchy that proved deadly. When Korean Air implemented training that encouraged teamwork and empowered all voices in the cockpit, its safety record transformed. In modern organizations, collaborative leaders flatten hierarchies and empower team members to think, speak, and lead. They listen more than they talk and make decisions informed by a wide range of perspectives. They know that authority doesnt mean having all the answersit means creating the conditions for the best answers to emerge. Purpose-Driven Leadership: Inspire, Dont Intimidate The traditional model of leadership motivates through pressure: meet your targets, or else. But this approach is a major driver of disengagement. According to Gallup, close to 80% of the global workforce is disengaged at work, costing businesses $8.8 trillion in lost productivity every year. Many are not just unmotivated: theyre working against their employers. Intimidation is costly, but leaders who inspire with purpose reverse that trend. Take Paul Polman, former CEO of Unilever, who focused not just on profits but on sustainability, health, and human well-being. Paul expanded the circles of connection and well-being, see circles in figure below. He ended quarterly earnings reportsan industry norm that drives short-termismand embedded social and environmental goals into the companys core strategy. The results? Unilever outperformed competitors and built one of the most admired brands in the world. Purpose-driven leaders dont lead with fear. They lead with vision. They make people care not just about what they do, but why they do it. In a generation of workers increasingly driven by values, this is your competitive edge. Emotionally Intelligent Leadership: Strength Through Empathy For decades, leaders were taught to leave emotion at the door, or at best at home. But the truth is, emotional intelligence is one of the most powerful tools a leader can have. The ability to recognize, understand, and manage emotionsboth your own and othersis essential for building trust, diffusing tension, and guiding teams through uncertainty. Nelson Mandela is perhaps the most powerful example of this. After 27 years in prison, he emerged not bitter or vengeful, but focused on reconciliation. His leadership brought South Africa back from the brink of civil warnot through force, but through empathy, humility, and vision. In business, emotionally intelligent leaders like Satya Nadella at Microsoft have reshaped company cultures by prioritizing learning, psychological safety, and inclusiveness. These leaders dont mistake kindness for weakness: they understand that people do their best work when they feel seen, heard, valued, and respected. The Future of Leadership Is Balance The traits that aggressive leaders dismiss as weaklistening, collaborating, empathizingare actually the ones that foster resilience, innovation, and long-term success. Masculine or feminine, theyre simply effective. And theyre precisely what todays challenges demand. The real question is whether leaders can meet the momentand the moment calls for balance of a wider range of leadership skills, our full human leadership potential. We need leaders who can be bold and humble, decisive and inclusive, confident and caring. For too long, leadership has rewarded those who speak the loudest and dominate the room. The future will reward those who can listen, connect, and bring people together. The age of aggressive leadership is over. The age of collaborative, purpose-driven, emotionally intelligent leadership has just begun. Ask yourself: What masculine and feminine leadership traits do I lead with? Are they balanced and effective to drive performance?
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E-Commerce
In 2021, Sanaa Shaikh was burned out. As a South Asian woman working in an overwhelmingly white and male profession, she had spent years experiencing her fair share of discrimination and microaggressionswhile at the same time being tasked with designing housing developments for underserved communities where she routinely felt like her ideas and perspective were dismissed. She was ready to move on. A friend asked whether shed consider going into public-sector work, and mentioned Public Practicea social enterprise that works to build the design skills and capacity of the public sector across the U.K. by bringing established professionals from architecture, landscape architecture, urban design, city and town planning, engineering, transportation, and ecology into local government. Sanaa Shaikh [Photo: courtesy Public Practice] After completing Public Practices program last year, Shaikh has remained in the public sector, working as placemaking lead for the London Borough of Bexley. In the role, she shapes urban design and develops planning guidance for the area, initiating efforts to reanimate its disinvested public realm to support local businesses and to ensure overlooked groups including young people and the elderly have free and accessible spaces to spend time. You have way more impact by designing for the everyday in the public sectoryoure actually contending with wider societal issues, Shaikh says. Public Practice was cofounded in 2017 by Pooja Agrawal and Finn Williams, both of whom were working for the Greater London AuthorityLondons city governmentin response to what they saw as a challenge facing local areas within the city. They found that nearly every local authority was struggling to attract qualified architecture and design professionals with the right skills to support their work. We set up Public Practice to see how we can make the public sector a player in driving development with public purpose in mind and raise the ambition and quality of what is being driven and delivered, Agrawal says. Pooja Agrawal [Photo: Benoît Grogan-Avignon/courtesy Public Practice] The rise and fall of public-sector designers Until the 1970s nearly half of U.K.-based architects worked in the public sector, with some of the most admired architects of their time working for local councils. But by 2020 that rate had dropped substantially. Agrawal attributes the decline to stagnant wages in the public sector, the increasingly outsize influence of the private sector in urban development, and a perception of local government as bureaucratic and ineffectual. These problems arent unique to the U.K.they are challenges for the urban planning and design professions in the U.S. and Canada as well. In their work, Agrawal and Finn could feel a marked difference in those local councils that had design skills in-house in their ability to deliver projects. And on the other side we were seeing increasing dissatisfaction with our peers and friends in the built environment sector but who hadnt seen public-sector work as a desirable option. They studied design because they had a social agenda and wanted to make a difference but ended up designing toilets instead, Agrawal says. Public Practice’s spring 2024 cohort [Photo: Benoît Grogan-Avignon/courtesy Public Practice] To address this, Public Practice devised its central associate program to partner up local authorities looking to build their in-house design capacity with yearlong cohorts of mid-career professionals, the majority of whom come from the private sector and are looking to transition into public-sector work. In their placements, these designers address everything from affordable housing and the climate crisis to town center redevelopment in response to changing retail patterns. Since that initial group, Public Practice has delivered more than a dozen cohorts and scaled from a focus on London to cities and towns across England and into Wales, placing more than 370 people with upward of 97 different public-sector organizations; nearly 75% of those people have remained working in the public sector. Alumni stay part of a community of practice, getting ideas and inspiration from other public-sector designers through a dedicated Slack group, learning trips, and public forum. [Photo: Dion Barrett/courtesy Public Practice] Redefining meaningful work Designer Laura Keay felt like she was hitting a wall after spending years as part of a two-person sustainable architecture studio doing low-embodied carbon, adaptive reuse, and retrofit buildings for multifamily homes, community spaces, schools, and cultural hubs in the U.K. and internationally. I felt like I was waving a green flag in a larger system that isnt always set up to support our values, Keay says. Laura Keay [Photo: Benoît Grogan-Avignon/courtesy Public Practice] She decided to do Public Practice to scale her impact beyond the few projects she was able to work on at any given time. Working across a diverse range of projects showed me how much design can do, but also where its influence stops without the right policies and systems behind it. Keay became a community retrofit officer with the London Borough of Merton, shaping planning policy and building retrofit strategies and sustainability frameworks to guide the area toward its transition to net zero by 2050. If we want sustainable and equitable places, change has to happen systemically from planning and policy and not just project to project, she says. In parallel to its placement program, Public Practice has been trying to instigate a wider culture and perception shift in how local government and public-sector work is thought of and talked about, even launching a magazine, Public Notice, that looks at the backstory of public space and public-sector projects. Theyve flipped that narrative and created a space where the public sector is now seen as an opportunity for real leadership and where the most meaningful work happens behind the scenes in policy writing and strategic planningthat it isn’t always about designing buildings, Keay says. I can’t believe Im saying that as an architect. [Photo: Benoît Grogan-Avignon/courtesy Public Practice] In the past seven years Public Practice has already had to weather and respond to ongoing internal and external crises, each of which has had implications for public planning and designfrom the pandemic, implementation of Brexit, changes in the U.K. government, and the Grenfell Tower tragedy. Public Practice is continuing to adapt to an ever-changing economic and political context with local authorities under increasing financial pressure and expectations to do more with less. The group has received inbound interest from cities in North America and Europe curious about the model and is starting to explore what it could look like to adapt its approach within different contexts. For us, international expansion isnt simply about rolling out the associate program globally, Agrawal says. Instead, its about developing new, locally embedded models that respond to different political, spatial, and institutional contexts while holding true to our core mission of building public-sector capability in place-based work.
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E-Commerce
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