In staying open over the Thanksgiving holiday, retailers are just giving customers what they want.

Yeah, right.

As the inevitable holiday shopping creep spreads to Thanksgiving Day, stores that plan to open on the holiday, including Kmart (SHLD), Walmart (WMT), Target (TGT) and Best Buy (BBY), say they’re merely responding to consumers who would be shopping online if they didn’t have the option to hit the stores. That’s part of it, no doubt, but an examination of retailers’ financial numbers reveals another reason: Many of them are underperforming and desperate for every dollar of sales. And virtually all those stores will be open on Thanksgiving.

Here’s a breakdown of financial numbers for several prominent retailers:

The final column, EPS growth over the past 12 months, may tell us the most about how each company is doing relative to its competitors and investor expectations. Nordstrom (JWN) and Costco (COST), which will be closed on Thanksgiving, are performing notably better in this regard than most of the other chains. The other two retailers we've included that will be closed on Thanksgiving — P.C. Richard, a northeast appliance chain, and BJ’s Wholesale, a warehouse club — are privately owned, so we don’t know much about their numbers. But there are other signs those chains are doing quite well, such as an aggressive expansion plan at P.C. Richard and a recent note by Moody’s on BJ’s debt that praised the company’s “excellent operating performance.”

Many of the chains opening on Thanksgiving Day, by contrast, have endured negative EPS growth during the past year. And three of those have gone from a negative EPS number last year (indicating a loss) to an even worse EPS number this year. (In the table, those companies have a ? in the EPS column.)

Traditionalists, predictably, have been venting about retailers “ruining” Thanksgiving, while praising stores that honor the holiday by staying closed. P.C. Richard has taken advantage of the humbuggery by running ads showing a gloomy family trying to eat a turkey dinner on a blanket, in the cold, while waiting in line for a store to open. “We believe Thanksgiving should be spent at home,” the narrator intones.

The lucky class

Yet the numbers suggest a lucky class of retailers will stay closed on Thanksgiving simply because they can afford to. The unlucky openers, by contrast, can’t risk losing a single dollar of sales to a competitor. “If you were the CEO of a retailer that wasn’t doing well and you didn’t open on Thanksgiving, you might as well not even come to work on Friday,” says Marshal Cohen, chief industry analyst at research firm NPD Group. “If you’re doing well and you don’t open, no big deal. Not everybody has to open.”