[Photo illustration by Reddit user kencrema.]
Yesterday was Thanksgiving. Days before Thanksgiving, I picked up Mom’s head cold, so the day of, I was boiling cranberries and sweet potatoes (no, not together; separate pots) and coughing away from the food. I felt like Typhoid Mary. But much of the rest of the family has already suffered from one virus or another recently, and everything I cooked was pretty well sterile by the time it got to everyone’s plate. I think. I hope.
That morning we got the big-ass Thanskgiving edition of The Reporter, which contained all the Black Friday ads. And of course, half the stores weren’t gonna bother to wait till Black Friday: Their doors were either open already, or were opening at 6 or 8 p.m. Which means their employees had to be there even earlier, and cut short their Thanksgiving dinners, or move them to a different day.
I call this “the War on Thanksgiving.” Never mind the War on Christmas; that’s all hype. The War on Thanksgiving is bound to be a lot more successful because it’s based on Mammonism: Businesses wanna make more money, certain employees wanna make more overtime (assuming their employers even offer them overtime pay for working Thanksgiving; Walmart doesn’t). Plenty of Christians who will object, at the drop of a hat, to anyone wishing them a Happy Holidays, quickly turn libertarian when it comes to working Thanksgiving. Or even Christmas. ’Cause it’s money. And nothing should interfere with Americans’ God-given right to make a buck… and drag their employees in, holidays be damned, in order to help them make those bucks.
The day after Thanksgiving has become known as Black Friday. It’s been widely reported as the biggest shopping day of the year. It’s not really. That’d be Cyber Monday, the Monday after Thanksgiving—and not just because people do all their online shopping on that day, for they don’t. They’re shopping online already. “Cyber Monday” is also hype. People simply shop Monday because they’ve decided the Thanksgiving four-day weekend is a holiday, dangit, so they’re gonna spend it with family and hang out together. Not all of us are so dysfunctional we’ll accept any excuse to bail on our irritating family members. So they wait till the weekend’s over.
The rest of us are either in the merchandising biz, or are obligated to work, or are consumers who really want to brave the crowds and madness for that sweet, sweet
Any dictionary will tell you a “black Friday” means a day darkened by disaster or tragedy. This is precisely why people call the day after Thanksgiving “Black Friday.” It sucks to be a clerk, a shopper, anyone out of the home, and certainly the local cops who have to do crowd control. The clerks have to work insane hours. A whole lot of shoppers choose to let their
Some years ago, someone started pushing the explanation, “It’s called that because after all the Christmas sales: The stores are back in the black.” Dan Cordtz of
Philadelphia merchants in the ’60s did not like the name when it was first used. Stores avoided the term like the plague. They tried to replace it with “Big Friday.” That is, till the mid-’00s: The redefinition caught on, and the media began reporting Cordtz’s ridiculous explanation if it were true. I wish to goodness they’d do their homework sometimes. Some do; Amy Merrick of The New Yorker did this year. But for the most part business reporters—like entertainment reporters and sports reporters, whose livelihood too often depends on sucking up to their sources—are sheep. They swallow the phony definition whole, and repeat it every year. The only good Black Friday is the Steely Dan song.
Certain Target ads some years ago featured a stereotypical crazed shopper. Wild-eyed with madness, she practiced running the aisles, speed-wrapping, and maniacally plotting to reach the sale items before they ran out of inventory. Guess she hadn’t heard of ordering stuff over the internet. And in fact some stores are refusing to have similar sale items on the internet: You had to be in the store Thanksgiving night if you want to lock in that price. No rainchecks.
Sadly, I have known people like the nut in the commercial. They’re the sort of type-A person who force their teenage kids to dress as reindeer for Christmas photos. (You can tell by the fake smiles in the photo; the deadness in their red eyes reveal how only their young ages are keeping them away from full-blown alcoholism. For now. I’ve been there.) Their families suffer too on Black Friday: They’re dragged to the bloody stores to watch their mother lose her tiny mind over sale items… then lose it again when, after the store runs out of sale items, she refuses to leave the store empty-handed, and scour it for whatever so-called “bargains” she might find, even if she has to snatch them out of other people’s shopping carts.
I’ve been to one such sale in my life, when I was a child. I don’t think it was on Black Friday. It was terrifying enough. I have since seen shoppers go manic over sale items many times. Shoppers regularly trash the local Walmart or dollar stores—you know, the downscale places where the clerks have just thrown up their hands and said, “Oh, they don’t pay me enough to care”—after every big sale. I don’t blame those clerks for hating Black Friday. I also don’t think the madness justifies being open at 6 p.m. Other stores don’t bother, and they do just fine.
Last year, Walmart workers in some states threatened to go on strike Thursday night, and spend Thanksgiving with their families. Most didn’t. This year there were some protests, A lot of the angst against Walmart is because of how it underpays its employees and shorts them on hours. Having to work on a holiday just drives home the point: They really don’t have any other options in their life. My conservative friends are quick to point out they’re not slaves; their bosses don’t owe them another dollar than they’ve agreed to. No, they don’t. But paying your workers as little as you can get away with, barely enough for them to live on, simply so the Walton family can keep adding to their billions: If that’s not ungenerous exploitation, my guess is you’d practice the very same evil, given the chance.
Last year, Mom hit the stores Thanksgiving night because of the chance of the
I spent it still recovering from the cold. Whenever I have a cold, I have acid reflux: I wake up multiple times a night with a mouthful of bile. Doesn’t matter how empty my stomach is, or how many antacids I’ve taken. So it means I have to sleep propped up, or even sitting up, as if I’m on an airline. I don’t sleep well that way. Today was a lot of sleeping in fits and starts—with a few interruptions from Mom, who wanted to know if I’m gonna stay in bed all day. Yes, Mom. At this rate, yes I am.
Well, I paused briefly to eat leftovers. And write this. And watch a few Friends reruns. But otherwise sleep. (Groan.)