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.
