The Day After

I am thankful for good friends. I’m also thankful for a cooked turkey in much less time than anticipated.

We Americans sure like to celebrate being gluttonous. After a day filled with more food than most of us eat in a week, many of us spend a ton of money on worthless crap because it is on sale. I mean, where else do people gather together and give thanks for friends and family and a few hour later push, shove, trample and do everything humanly possible to get that “great deal” advertised in the newspaper the day before? I don’t know about you, but I have only ever ventured out into the abyss known as Black Friday once in my life and that was because I had spent the night making music videos with my cousins (because that’s just what we used to do) and were all planning on leaving to go shopping with most of my aunts and grandma so I tagged along. It was a nightmare.

Then, just for arguments sake, I’ll take the other end of the spectrum and say that the day after Thanksgiving when you work retail, as I did for nine years, was crazy. I’ll have to admit that it was kind of fun watching a stampede in progress filled with some of the most ghetto people who couldn’t be bothered to dress in regular people clothes or do their hair racing towards you in a panicked frenzy to grab the latest Elmo or pick over pajama sets. Sometimes you just gotta know when to step aside and let the craziness happen. After all, most of these people hadn’t been to bed in days so they could save a couple bucks.

I’m not sure if it is because I’m already a bargain hunter to begin with or if the idea of being trapped with a bunch of strangers in a building where there are only one or two exits and the sheer amount of people well exceeds fire code and my claustrophobia might cause be to have a panic attack, but shopping on Black Friday doesn’t appeal to me. Especially since it is simply a day to get most big box retail stores out of the red, as in debt, and back into the black, as in profit. Alas, if I had the money, I’d do my shopping tomorrow instead on Small Business Saturday. I would feel much better spending money at a mom and pop shop then at an evil corporation made with evil parts for the sole purpose of committing evil.