“Black” doesn’t mean bleak or dark, in this case. It’s supposedly a good thing. It means the day when retailers go “into the black” -- or profitability -- for the year. If sales are good. (Note that means they are running at a loss for nearly 11 full months of the year…what’s wrong with THAT picture?)
I am drawn to this phenom like road kill. It is fascinating yet repulsive at the same time. I don’t seem to be able to stop myself and look away.
For days and even weeks, it seems, news interviewers (I hesitate to call them journalists) are featuring Black Friday specials and strategy tips. Duluth-born Comedienne Maria Bamford is pumping herself up for a two-day shopping work-out at Target, in quirky ads (love them or hate them) where she is sporting sweats and high heels and doing sit ups on the red cement ball outside a Target store. Kohl’s ad folks unwisely chose to remake Rebecca Stone’s insipid “Friday” song into a “Black Friday” ad.
2008 Black Friday should be remembered as the year an obedient Walmart employee unlocked the doors at 5 a.m. and was promptly trampled to death.
2011 Black Friday should be remembered as the year it was actually Black Thursday -- Thanksgiving itself -- when some stores opened at 9 p.m. Thanksgiving night. Others waited til midnight, rather than 4 or 5 a.m. on Friday.
Even if Thanksgiving isn’t your favorite holiday, or your family can’t stand the sight of each other or turkey, it still is so crass to start the mad rush to shopping on the actual holiday that it could only happen in America. This is what we fought for freedom and independence, to have the right to be crass in the face of a national holiday, tripping off a mad, crass rush to the next national holiday, without which retailers across the country simply could not exist. If everyone was a Grinch and did not shop, the U.S. economy would simply dry up.
So, in our best patriotic effort to boost the economy, we are trampling minimum-wage employees at 5 a.m. to get to a cheap TV.
And never has Black Friday been so “successful.” Sales were up almost 7% nationwide. Some stores were up by 24% or more.
News reports said 15,000 people lined up early to get into the massive Mall of America in the Twin Cities at midnight. A total of 210,000 people shopped the mall that day. That’s up from 200,000, meaning 10,000 MORE people showed up this year. The increase alone is a little less than three times the population of a town in which I have an office.
Same number (10,000) waited for the flagship Macy’s store in NYC to open its doors at midnight, the earliest time ever (how they had time to clean up after the Thanksgiving Day parade I will never know). While some were heading for the $199 white gold diamond stud earrings, others waited for hours for the privilege to buy Justin Beiber’s fragrance set, which came with a holiday CD featuring a very, very special bonus track.
Electronics are always the most popular and heavily discounted items. Best Buy had people in milder climates camping for weeks to get a $199.99 42-inch Sharp LCD TV. This takes a great deal of planning because, to my knowledge, Best Buy does not provide portable toilets in the parking lot. It should.
It should also remind customers that not everyone in the line will get a $199.99 42-inch TV, because there are limited numbers of the featured “doorbuster” item. No rain checks, either.
Even though nearly every large retailer does this, it seems a little bait-and-switchy, if not cruel and unusual, to me. People are incited to come out for the right to buy something dirt cheap that they may not have the chance to get. This leads to rudeness at best and danger at worst.
This competition, in turn, incites violence, albeit most of it at Walmart, which apparently attracts a higher proportion of shoppers with abysmally bad manners. This year at various Walmarts around the country, all kinds of nasty things happened, even though no one gave his life for the right to shop cheap.
This year, pepper spray was used on shoppers in two Walmarts. In California, a woman wanted an X-Box 360 gaming system so badly that she pepper-sprayed her fellow customers so they’d get out of the way (they did – she paid for her items and walked out of the store, though she later surrendered to police). In North Carolina, a Walmart security guard thought that there was a fight at the cell phone display – into which someone had fallen during the rush – so he pepper-sprayed the customers.
Also in California, a man who got his Black Friday shopping done and was taking his treasures to the parking lot, was shot and robbed.
Lovely.
I know of only two times otherwise reasonable people typically showcase downright animalistic bad behavior that they would never display otherwise: during divorce proceedings and on Black Friday.
At least in divorce, presumably you could blame jealousy, anger, hurt or the welfare of the children as making you temporarily insane. On Black Friday, there’s only one motivation: greed.
Irony of irony, the holiday for which this greed is unleashed is about giving, not getting.
If small businesses really are the powerhouse that energizes this country’s economy, I’ve never heard of small businesses being able to offer incredibly low-low-low doorbusting values! (Their wholesale buying power isn’t that strong.)
I know, I know, it’s not all bad. Not everyone is a rude pig. Some families or friends make an outing of it. Now starting the shopping season this day is a beloved tradition.
But we should quit using over-shopping as recreation, just as we have to stop over-eating for entertainment or emotional fulfillment.
As bad as this sounds, this country ought to be incented to SAVE, not spend. (Blasphemy!)
Savings rates typically go up during and after a recession – because people are scared and know it’s not smart to spend more than you earn.
According to the US Department of Commerce Bureau of Economic Analysis, the savings rate went up after the Great Recession of 2008-09 to the highest it had been since the mid-1990s.
Not anymore. It’s way down -- again. I’m guessing it will be even lower come next month when the credit card bills arrive.
I kind of liked the analogies during the Great Financial Bailout to where we could have given taxpayers x number of dollars (lots!) rather than bail out, say, Bank of America or AIG.
So I’d like to Black Savings Friday: every bank in the country can deposit, say, $1000 per person bailout dollars to anyone old and literate enough to sign their name and open a savings account. You’d have to agree to spend only half of it in the first year, and add to it the second, something like that…
Save time! Open the account on line – Cyber Savings Friday!
Got a kid or two or five? Open them for them as well – Happy Holidays!
Lines around the block for your free $1000 savings account??? Can’t play a video game in it. Can’t sparkle with diamonds in your ears. Can’t smell like Justin Beiber.
OK, maybe not.
In fact, next year, let’s get stores to stay open til, say, noon on Christmas Day. You can still buy presents for people you won’t see until Christmas afternoon or evening.
Say, help me out here: where do you buy pepper spray, anyway?
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