Black Thursday

Scott Hardie | December 2, 2013
Much is being made of the so-called "War on Thanksgiving" in which retailers force employees to work on the holiday itself, instead of merely early the next morning. I have friends who are forced to work this day, and I sympathize with their misery, because moving up the start time of the event into a national holiday is a crappy way to treat hard-working people and yet another sacrificing of an American tradition in the name of corporate greed. But you know what? The protests and boycotts and whining en masse on social media is a waste of time, because there are teeming hordes of people lined up outside of stores on Black Friday, violently competing to buy mundane crap, and the anti-corporate objections cannot hope to counter that kind of frenzied excitement. Until millions of people cease to bargain-hunt on that day, we all may as well get used to "Black Friday" starting on Thursday.

While traveling for the last two weeks, I was subjected to more than a few commercials hyping the holiday sales. The most obnoxious must have been the JC Penney commercial with carolers singing inside someone's kitchen while she cleaned up after the Thanksgiving meal, urging her in verse to "go go go go go, shop shop shop shop" until she surrendered and headed to the store. I had to admire the ad for boiling down every commercial's message to its essence, at least. When I described Thanksgiving as a national holiday deserving of some reverence, Kelly pointed out that retail consumerism has become our de facto national religion, and so Black Friday is the true holiest day of the year. We express our love for each other by giving expensive gifts of redundant junk that clutters our homes, even if it means sacrificing valuable time at home with the very people we love, and we delude ourselves into thinking we beat the system by scoring some kind of asinine deal like a few dollars off of a sweater, when the system has clearly beaten us all. (Aside: I don't think consumerism is the holiest secular faith of American society, because you can still openly criticize it. I think soldier deification/worship is our true religion, because for someone to suggest that all the "support the troops" sloganeering has gotten out of hand is to incite a virtual lynch mob attacking the blasphemer.)

What are your thoughts now that the big retail weekend is over? Did you go shopping, and if so, did you enjoy it or regret it?

Steve West | December 2, 2013
I went for the first/last time ever on Thursday evening when Kohl's started Black Friday early at 8:00 PM Thursday night. I had always refused to go to any store at 4:00 AM considering that hour ungodly but 8:00 PM seemed reasonable. When we got there, there were no screaming hordes and the deals were admittedly good but mostly on stuff I'd never consider buying in the first place.

Brenda and I needed clothes for the girls as it turned out so we shopped for that anyway. Olivia is a tough fit because she's at the upper end of her range of growth (she's 11 now and as tall as Brenda) and is made bigger because of the brace she wears for scoliosis. She makes for a pretty tough fit and the brace speeds up the process of wearing out her shirts. So we got 5 shirts for Olivia, a cute working camera/videocam for kids, a pair of fingerless gloves for Lauren and a few gifts for other children in our extended family. When I searched for the cash register, I found they had none on the second floor and had to go downstairs. They had set it up so that there was only one line for the registers which were all grouped in one area of the store (approximately twelve altogether. But creating one line caused a bottleneck so severe it wrapped around the store.

When I initially got in line I had no idea of its length. There were convenient mile markers that were intended to soothe by claiming, "You are only fifteen minutes from the registers at this point." Fifteen minutes later I was at the next mile marker which claimed the exact same thing. After an hour in line I reached that point where you convince yourself to stay because of the time already invested. We finally were able to pay for our items after rebuffing the aggressive store clerk hawking the store's credit card four times. The receipt happily displayed how much I saved because of the sales and it looked impressive except it only made me wonder how much the items were overpriced to begin with and could I have paid the same at Target next week for the exact same items and gotten the exact same price.

So, all in all, it was a fairly demoralizing experience. I would suggest they have the ballpark vendor guys sell hot dogs while you're in line or maybe have jugglers and magicians on the route. Then I might consider going again - but I highly doubt it.

Samir Mehta | December 2, 2013
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Scott Hardie | December 12, 2013
Steve, that definitely sounds demoralizing. What an awful experience, and for what? It does illustrate why retailers need more employees working on the holiday rather than less. (I'm not supporting Black Thursday or whatever it's going to be called; I'm just saying that resistance is futile.) If you had the foresight, you could have claimed a place in the checkout line as soon as you arrived while Brenda shopped for an hour so that you could have a shorter trip, but then, if you had the foresight you probably wouldn't have gone at all.

Samir, I don't get the violent aggression either. I cannot believe that it's actually about any so-called deals, not when they're so minor. It could be a "feeding frenzy" mentality fostered by the retailers who depend on irrational excitement. Or, it might be that the increasingly anxious tenor of this annual event is drawing out a certain George Zimmerman-like type who (consciously or not) seeks out and/or creates violent confrontation. Or, it might just be that this kind of aggressive competition at the local marketplace has been around since the dawn of civilization, and we're mistaking this for something new.

About the troops, the binary reasoning is what vexes me too, the idea that everyone is expected to march in lockstep with this sanctification of soldiers, and to express any contrary opinion in even the slightest way is to scorn them, a completely false dichotomy. We're so ready to pounce on troop-haters that we don't stop to realize that such a thing is ridiculous; they're as real as leprechauns. What average American would sincerely "hate the troops"? What kind of position is that to take? Do they also hate puppies and rainbows and ice cream, and other universally beloved things? I say that jokingly, but there is widespread denounciation of some Americans who "hate freedom" or democracy or even America itself, because they sometimes speak honestly about our nation's shortcomings. It's frustrating.

Chris Lemler | December 12, 2013
Black Thursday to me is not a good day to go out. Because people get to pushy and shove people and even trample and die. But that's my opinion. I never been shopping on that day and I would probably never go. But the people that do go out there be careful and watch your backs and fronts

Scott Hardie | December 16, 2013
I don't especially enjoy shopping on a good day, but I certainly can't imagine enjoying it when people are that pushy and reckless. But I guess you're not supposed to enjoy it, at least not as the primary reason for going. You're just supposed to go go go go go, shop shop shop shop.

Perhaps in searching for a reason for the violence on the holiday, we've overlooked media bias toward the sensational. Millions of Americans go shopping on Black Thursday and Black Friday, right? While the media reports on a fistfight over some towels in an Arkansas Walmart, tens of thousands of other stores across the country are holding sales with no shopper-on-shopper violence whatsoever. Perhaps the violence isn't really happening as widely as it seems, and our perception that Black Thursday/Friday is violent is a false one.

Denise Sawicki | December 16, 2013
Steve scared me a little about Kohl's but luckily by now it's calmed down quite a bit! :) They keep sending us these free $10 gift cards in the mail, yay... I would not shop on Black Thursday or Black Friday. I stay away from that many people in general :)

Scott Hardie | December 29, 2013
I keep hearing a figure cited that online sales accounted for only 6% of our retail purchases this season. That's astounding to me, because it seems that nearly everyone I know shops online. I'm sure the problem is my own bias, since I happen to know many people who are web-savvy and few who aren't. A friend told me that back in the nineties, she once bought all of her Christmas gifts online just to prove to her family that it could be done; this year, she's buying all of the presents in stores just to prove that it was still normal.