After all, here we have a day that combines so many of my least favorite things: long lines, big crowds, rude people, insufficient parking, endless waiting, physical discomfort, generic Christmas Muzak from which there is no escape, and of course a celebration of unbridled, unabashed greed and consumerist messaging that chips away at your resolve to be fiscally responsible until there's nothing left to to but flee...straight into a crowd of anxious, angry, exhausted smokers huddling together just outside of the Mall doors, exchanging war stories and "refueling" for the next retail assault.
Just about everything to do with Black Friday feels like punishment to me; you couldn't get me near a Mall today except under great duress. I don't think I've been near a Mall in late November or December for years now.
It wasn't always this way.
Although the period immediately following Thanksgiving has traditionally kicked off the holiday shopping season for many years now, Black Friday as we know it today -- a national shopping frenzy supported by heavy media exposure and deep discounts -- is actually a fairly recent phenomenon, with the term itself only going national in the late '70s and early '80s. The super-early store openings, overnight camp-outs, and frenzied crush of bargain-happy shoppers have only been with us for a couple of decades. I remember post-Turkey Day trips to the mall with my family in the late '70s where the longest lines were at McDonald's around dinner time and they were just rolling out the Christmas displays and switching over to Muzak carols.
Once upon a time, right after college, I did a stint in retail. It was somewhat thankless...very long hours and random shifts, dealing with exhausted, short-tempered shoppers all day and night, saying the same few phrases over and over, answering the same few questions over and over, hearing the same music on a loop day in and day out, madly restocking shelves, and always selling, selling, selling as if your life depended on it (well, as if the rent depended on it, at any rate). You're tired all the time -- and I was an energetic, caffeine-and-nicotine-fueled twentysomething back then; can't even imagine how wiped out I'd feel now! I routinely worked 12-hour days and shooed customers out of the shop at 10 PM, barely able to keep the fake smile on my face. (Though to be fair, I did pick up some pretty impressive change-counting and gift-wrapping skills!)
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