It’s Black Friday

Black Friday (so named because retailers are hoping that on the day after Thanksgiving, the big push to begin Christmas shopping will send them from the red and into the black) is today. Named the biggest shopping day of the year, mostly because they tell people that it is so that they feel obliged to join in, I’ve never cared all that much to partake, mostly because to me the benefit of “Sweet Home Alabama” on DVD for $4.59 or a $60.00 13″ TV doesn’t really outweigh the cost of queuing up outside of a ShopKo at four in the morning in below freezing temperatures and facing the dark side of consumer humanity, greedy and selfish enough to draw up thoughts of Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness”. The basic idea behind this is that if the retailers lower prices on key items that are annual gifts, such as TVs, DVD players, cameras, movies and games, and so forth, to a point sometimes at or below cost, in the hopes that the herded cattle will be buying everything else at normal “sale” prices, creating a long tail, to use one of the popular buzz words created on the intarwebs. A rising tide lifts all boats, as it were.

But anyway, Shelby woke me up at 3:15 this morning, so I could go with her to ShopKo and stand in line and freeze and face the acrimony of shrewish housewives and gawkish gamers all looking for their dream deal. Being as I essentially live across the street from a mall, I got to drive past Circuit City at four in the morning. The parking lot was quite literally full, and there was a line nearly a quarter mile long of people hoveled outside. Nerds have neither jobs nor girlfriends to tie them down; therefore they have the freedom to set up tents and sleeping bags in a long queue. I imagine a long line of McDonald’s wrappers and empty Mountain Dew bottles left behind after today. Fortunately ShopKo was not quite as bad, only twenty or thirty people there. However, by the time the doors opened up at five, there were nearly 200 waiting outside. And 45 minutes in the thirty degree pre-dawn weather pretty much sucks. (Words fail me to describe that, so I’ll leave it so.) I stood behind a couple of nice Vietnamese fellows, and to my rear two women who had arrived seperately but knew each other. One was in her forties, and the Christainly housemom type, the other was around 30, and kinda cute. I chatted with them for a bit and they seemed nice enough, at least until someone tried to cut in line, at which point a flood of bile and f-bombs spewed forth from the elder’s mouth.

Finally five am comes, and the doors are unlocked and everyone rushes to the door. Quite literally a big “push” forward as two hundred people move in unison to move through a three-foot wide portal. It doesn’t work so well. Families are seperated quite quickly as people grab their trolley and literally run through the store looking for the cheap stuff. Arguments break out as people fight over who was there first for the 15 dollar toaster oven or the 25 dollar DVD player. I opted to stroll casually, occasionally stopping to switch songs on my iPod. I didn’t really find anything I wanted, too. I was really hoping to find a copy of We ♥ Katamari, for the PS2, but they didn’t have any. And the only Futurama DVD they had was fifty bucks. Those normally retail from $32 to $40. So I passed on that. Shelby ended up getting some bedsheets and a food processor or something, I didn’t really look. This is when the third act comes into play. After lining up outside the door for 45 minutes, rushing around the store in a mad dash for 20 minutes, finally you end up waiting at the checkout registers for another half hour. And trust me, in my case I found out, the people behind you really hate you if you don’t end up buying anything. Dirty glances abound.

All in all, I would say that the trip was far from worth it for me, though I wish I had snapped pictures. I also wish I had brought a Super Soaker for spraying down nerds lined up outside of Circuit City, but that’s kind of away from the point. I probably won’t be doing this again next year, unless of course my credit limit is raised by then.

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