Black Friday
I am just like everybody else.
This year, for the second time, ever, I stayed up waaay late into the early morning to attend the annual American consumer event known as Black Friday.
Now, Black Friday might sound a little ominous to readers outside the U.S., and it’s often puzzling to my non-Stateside friends. (Having never asked them if they have any equivalent event, I really don’t know what to compare it to.) The name originates from when accounting records were kept by hand in ledgers, using red ink to signify loss (“in the red”) and black ink to signify income at the end of the month (“in the black”). Black Friday, the Friday after Thanksgiving, is often an unofficial holiday for workers, and has thus become a prime date for exceptional deals and savings at stores. It’s now the traditional day to kick off major holiday shopping, and is the symbolic day of the year when store revenues goes from red to black.
This year, my friend Rags and I hatched the foolish plan of staying up to attend because we had Nothing Else Better to To. He ended up hauling my ass in the morning to get in on a $249, 32″ widescreen tv deal, and pick up a few other knick knacks along the way. I guess I should be more thankful Rags stayed up till 3am in the morning and guilt-tripped me into going shopping. Ironically, he wasn’t the one with a 32″ tv he needed to buy.
We arrived at 3:30am at the local Target, and found a small, very reasonable crowd already camped out before the doors. A few Target employees stood around keeping guard, and most everyone seemed very civil; and the line, really, was quite short. I was surprised. As the minutes worn on, a well-dressed lady started working her way down the lines passing out vouchers for the high-demand items from the Target holiday shopping list.
“Wow,” I said to Rags, “this is really organized.” It was not at all the insanity I expected.
“They’re probably all worried about what happened at Walmart last year,” he said, “When that person was trampled to death.”
As reasonable of a liability concern as that was, I was still impressed. In the hour before the store was about to open, employees even came down the line with special Target cloth bags for the eager shoppers. The whole atmosphere felt more professional than the ugly commercial sell-out affair I had come to build up in my head. (A couple years ago I was at the Black Friday shopping stampede at the Great Mall, and that was just consumer madness, which is probably where my impression comes from.)
“This is really so nicely run!” I said again and again to Rags, “It’s Just Like Comic Con!”
And well, really, it wasn’t. The crow control was much better, and it was by far not quite as “squee!” as waiting in line to get a Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along-Blog signature, but the comraderie of fellow line waiters was there, and plus, there was random free stuff just standing in line. I had such a good time, browsing around, blinking blearily, and just shooting the breeze with Rags, I am thinking about doing it again next year, and checking ahead for super deals. My final loot count this year was some $400-odd dollars, and included a very shiny flatscreen as well as new DVD player, small remote-control boatload of DVD shows, various Christmas presents, and a large bag full of towels.
It is the towels, actually, that I cherish the most. ($1.50 each, baby!)