Don't Forget Your Humanity This Black Friday

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Bring your holy water too, if you decide to go shopping.
 
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I won’t be anywhere near a mall today. The entire “black friday” phenonemon is something I’ve never participated in.
 
Me and my mom tried getting groceries on black Friday years ago. The line at Walmart stretched all the way back to electronics (electronics is at the very back of the store, registers in front). We lost our patience and ditched our cart. That’s what happens when you only have two cashiers working. 🤷‍♂️
 
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We do a little online shopping on Black Friday and otherwise we spend the day decorating for Advent/Christmas. I’ve never had any desire to go out shopping in such crowds.
 
Thank you for this thoughtful post. I worked 32 years for walmarts competition before I had to go on total disability due to type1 diabetes and having major arthritus and it was not easy working during that time.
 
Some, perhaps most, of us have never bothered with this since it was invented.

When I was much younger, decades ago before WalMart was even invented, I might go out to a mall with my friends the day after Thanksgiving in order to leisurely browse, eat a snack and just enjoy a day off from school, but not with the idea of shopping up a storm (I didn’t have much money then), getting discount deals, or being in the middle of some riot. It has never made sense to me why anyone would think that was fun.

A person I know who is at the lower end of the socioeconomic spectrum explained to us that many people who participate in the Black Friday events truly need to get the item at the discount or they can’t afford it at all, also that people being outraged at Black Friday is to some degree classist/ elitist. Thinking of that statement together with the Vincentian’s course on how poorer people put a huge value on entertainment or having something to do, that middle class people don’t, I think this explains a lot.
 
I worked retail for too many years. Haven’t been in a store on Black Friday since.
 
The first time I remember there being a riot was with the Cabbage Patch Kids.
They deliberately didn’t manufacture enough to meet demand…
 
I don’t go to stores on black Friday. I prefer cyber Monday 🤓
 
angel12 said:
I worked retail for too many years. Haven’t been in a store on Black Friday since.
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Amen!

Every now and then, my husband will drag me out to a store on Black Friday. I always groan and try to change his mind.

I hate crowds. They make me nervous.
 
Tis_Bearself said:
Some, perhaps most, of us have never bothered with this since it was invented.
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I think its always been “black Friday”. Its called “black” as its the day in the year when so many retailers enter the “black” ( profitability) for the year.
 
The term “Black Friday” in USA used to mean the stock market crash of 1929. This persisted right up through the 70s and 80s. Steely Dan had a popular song called “Black Friday” in the 70s that was definitely about the market crash.

As I understand it, the term only began to be used for the Friday after Thanksgiving around the late 90s, which also seems to be the time when a lot of department stores and big box retailers started having special shopping events that day. The biggest shopping days of the year used to be the weekend before Christmas, now they push it earlier.
 
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Accidentally got stuck in mall traffic today. I just wanted to get a gallon of milk and had to take all sorts of circuitous routes.
 
Augustinian said:
I won’t be anywhere near a mall today. The entire “black friday” phenonemon is something I’ve never participated in.
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Normally I don’t, but my parents live right next to a mall now, and I needed an excuse to burn off the Thanksgiving calories. It was fun dodging everyone, even if they made a mistake with stock and falsely got my hopes up about getting the game I wanted. 😦
Thom18 said:
The line at Walmart stretched all the way back to electronics (electronics is at the very back of the store, registers in front).
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And I can guarantee you that a lot of those people said to their cashier, “It’s such a shame that you have to work today!” :roll_eyes:
Gingersnaps4 said:
We do a little online shopping on Black Friday
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That’s what I normally do, but I’m moving this year and don’t want to risk that it doesn’t get here in time.
theCardinalbird said:
I don’t go to stores on black Friday. I prefer cyber Monday 🤓
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One of these years I’m going to use it to build me a sweet gaming desktop. I just need to decide if the few Windows exclusive games I want are worth the suffering Windows will cause…Nah, they aren’t. I wonder how Ubuntu does on a high-end screen. 🤓
 
ZMystiCat said:
And I can guarantee you that a lot of those people said to their cashier, “It’s such a shame that you have to work today!” :roll_eyes:
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I had to work during the Super Bowl (I was working in the deli at that point). People had to stay late to get all of our orders finished. I felt more bad for myself than the cashiers 😛
 
We get our Christmas tree and decorate it, put up our Advent/Christmas greenery and other decor, crèche, and Advent wreath, calendar and Jesse tree. We don’t start lighting our wreath or doing anything else related to Advent until it starts, but we do all our decorating on Black Friday of every year. We have always done it this way even before we were Catholic.
 
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