Tag: Black Friday

Posted on

How dark does Black Friday have to be?

I stayed up late enough last night that I could have been in line for… well, I haven’t the slightest idea what “door buster sales” might have started at midnight, but I feel no shame in not participating. Nor do I feel shame in sleeping late. Nor taking a nap. Nor not buying a damn thing today. (I thought about getting something from Amazon.com, but I’ll see how things look on Cyber Monday instead.)

Meanwhile, I read an article online referring to police reports about how some people were so intent on getting good deals today that there were several shootings, a bomb threat and a woman who used pepper spray to clear out her competition. You’d think that in a Wal-Mart (yes, all of these incidents in the article happened at Wal-Mart stores), someone in the sporting goods section would grab a golf club or something, but noooooo, they were all too busy trying to get cheap DVD players instead. And besides, if there’s not a “door buster sale” on golf clubs, why would anyone be in that part of the store?

Posted on

Merry Christmas! Love, Walmart!

Today, I decided I want to hunt down the Walmart executives and strangle them with Christmas lights. Why? Because they’re continually moving the winter holidays forward. Perhaps they weren’t the ones who started playing Christmas music in October, but they’re the ones responsible for the pain in my stomach when I was reading the paper this afternoon. (I sincerely doubt it was the peanut butter and jelly sandwich…)

On the front page, there were a few paragraphs about Best Buy now accepting electronics with screens for free where they used to charge people ten bucks. It attracted my attention because I have an old computer from the 90s that doesn’t communicate with other computers anymore. Seriously. I’ve tried to put stuff in the USB ports and the old computer doesn’t understand what the hell the thing is, just that it’s being violated. So now it’s all unplugged and sitting in my room: tower, keyboard, mouse and big monitor.

The paper said the article continued on another page, so I delved into the business section, read the last few paragraphs, then looked at the other page and discovered how Walmart is celebrating Thanksgiving this year. They were the first ones to start Black Friday at midnight. This year, they will be the first ones to start Black Friday before Friday. On Thursday at 10:00pm, they will begin selling toys and clothes, then everything else starting at midnight.

I cannot insert enough curse words to explain my frustration. This reminds me of the late night TV struggles a year or two ago when NBC wanted to push The Tonight Show back to 12:05am, meaning it would technically be The Really, Really Early Show. Things ended poorly there, but in Walmart’s case, no one’s going to stop them. No one can stop them. They’re a retail monster. Hell, this’ll probably get other companies to start opening on Thursday just to stay competitive. Regardless, if they ever start playing Christmas music before my birthday—October 19th—I’m gonna hunt down some Walmart executive and teach my old monitor how to communicate with his head.

Posted on

Sinful statistics

Black Friday. The day after Thanksgiving. Clumping two deadly sins into a four-day weekend: gluttony (feasting on turkey, stuffing and football) followed by covetousness (trampling Wal-Mart employees to death to get our sinful hands on a $99 DVD player). Oh, and if you include Cyber Monday in the festivities, you can add another deadly sin into the mix: sloth (people too lazy to brave the shopping malls for those $99 DVD players). Ah, what a blessed holiday!

But that’s not what I wanted to focus on. I was watching the 10:00 news on Friday night and the newscaster said that sales on Black Friday were up 4% compared to last year. “Wow, maybe the recession isn’t so bad if people are still willing to blow wads of cash on unnecessary junk!” Then the newspaper arrived the next morning to alert its readers that sales on Black Friday were down this year. Obviously, it was looking at the state results versus the local TV news reporting national stats, but it made me wonder:

Which source reflects the media’s liberal bias?

Or maybe they were trying to make us all look like sinnier sinners by accusing us of covetousness and sloth at the same time: “You all wanted too much stuff, but you locals were too lazy to buy it!” Personally, I’m gonna stick with gluttony and start working on the leftovers that are packed into the fridge…