Black Friday is a sad, apocalyptic wallet safari. You'll thank yourself for staying home
In the late 1990s, before Black Friday became the even more consumptive spectacle it is today, it was easy for me and my fellow teen retail drones to see what it was: a day of profound unhappiness for everyone other than us. For us, it was a day of transforming into individual Werner Herzogs as we watched phantom deals chased by an endless parade of people with sickness of the soul. For everyone else, it was and supposedly remains the Worst American Retail Day of the Year.
Working on Thanksgiving sucks, unless you’re young and really don’t give a damn and want the time-and-a-half wage. But working Black Friday was like working recess with no monitors and overtime pay: the rules didn’t matter, often at the customer’s expense.
Over drinks, anyone who has ever worked in retail or restaurants will trade horror stories of bad costumers and even worse “sales”, and even the tales of younger friends and relatives simply corroborate the universality of my teenage experiences of multiple Black Fridays at some of America’s bro-est and khakiest factory outlet stores. (Sell out after college, kids – not before it – in retail.)
My trump card in these conversations is this: One year my store got what seemed like a shipping container of boxes of women’s sleeveless white poplin shirts to sell for $19.99. We neatly fanned them out in a circle on a round display table that Friday morning, just before opening. (The stores open on Thanksgiving now.) The table of shirts was so totally plundered by shoppers so quickly that I started bringing out boxes and just razoring them open right there on the table, letting people rifle through the shirts as they appeared shipped to us – plastic clothespins on them, sticky size labels, inside a plastic bag marked THIS BAG IS NOT A TOY. (You know, in case you wanted to stand in the middle of the sales floor and stick one over your head during orgasm or maybe play “Baby Space Helmet” with it.)
Eventually, I realized I could make people tear the box apart in frenzy if I waited until only a few shirts remained on the table, then came out with a box and said, “Looks like this is the last one in the back!” Nobody stayed in the store for more than an hour, so I repeated this nearly hourly until closing. It was like a the Kwik-E-Mart before the hurricane, when Apu writes “Hurricane Chow” over a bag of “Cat Chow” and the citizens of Springfield ransack the place in pre-disaster scarcity panic. Worst of all, the people who thought they were getting a bargain $20 summer shirt in November could have just come back the week before Christmas and purchased it at $16.99. Or returned in April, when they were still on the rack, at $14.99.
The most soul-annihilating thing about retail work is the drudgery – the interminable slow downtime where you fold 150 shirts in a row, beautifully stack them, then watch some benighted meathead with fingers stained from a visit to the Chocolate Factory jam his hand smack-dab in the middle of a stack of shirts that are all clearly marked as the same size, yank one shirt out, destroy the pile and make you start all over. (Never do this. Always take from the top, unless the size you want is in the middle, in which case ask the clerk to get it for you. He or she isbored and will be happy to do this for you to break the monotony.)
Black Friday is the opposite of drudgery, because everything is in such a constant state of FUBAR that nothing as stultifyingly mundane as perfectly folded shirts actually even matters. Nothing. It is a daylong orgiastic incarnation of the thing you feel every day that you work there: a few moments of genuine concern and eagerness to help, surrounded by an utter incapacity to give a fuck.
There are so many other stories of Black Fridays past that still make me smile. Like climbing 30 feet atop the rolling lundia racks – no relation – in the stock room, waiting for fellow employees to yell “Marco!” and then upending boxes of polo shirts on them. Or the time I wheeled out a cart filled with jeans along with a cute red-haired woman kneeling on top of it who sang, “I am the Pied Piper of denim” while holding out pairs of jeans. People clustered around her like she was giving alms to the poor, despite the fact that there was always a wall filled with the same jeans.
I could keep telling silly stories, but that’s not the point. Eventually, the point dawned on all of us: the only job we could really do was to prevent theft amid the depredations of what otherwise resembled a store. In that motionless, watchful space apart, you start to notice things.
You notice that the street outside is gridlocked, with people yelling to and from cars, everyone with bags and children screaming and everyone walking agitatedly. You notice people with SUVs abandoning all pretense of searching for parking spots and, instead, parking up on the elevated lawns of parking-lot row dividers. You notice mothers or fathers frog-marching children pressed into service as pack carriers for some endless scavenger hunt of value, listed and scheduled for a day of animal transport.
The trick with looking out at a sea of people and trying to find the person who is least unhappy is that, if the answer doesn’t present itself after a while, the answer is probably “you”. We were just teen screw-ups blowing off responsibility while racking up overtime and watching the system blow itself up by design, but the lion’s share of people shopping on Black Friday run the gamut from harried and impatient to somewhere on the verge of apocalyptic rage breakdown or inconsolable tears.
While a lot of people, after all, reallycould use the deal, it was heartbreaking to not be able to pull them aside and say, “Take your kids to a park. The deal will still be here tomorrow and the next week and the next.” With others – the types on a prosperity wallet safari – we’d sometimes ask why they were there at all. Apart from the largely phantom pursuit of “One Day Bargains” that weren’t, most people said, “To get out of the house.”
Even then, people acted as if Thanksgiving were a competition over who could be most victimized by vacation time and loved ones, and shopping was the terminus of the escape route.
Some people have horrible relatives whose inconsiderate behavior and constant demands for attention can really only be dealt with by way of escape, and those people deserve our sympathy. For many more people, buying things can light up pleasure centers in the brain: maybe they don’t need the things they’re buying, but acquiring anything makes them feel better. Retail therapy is a real thing, and as long as it’s affordable, stops short of gratuitous excess and is not someone’s only coping mechanism, it’s OK. We all do sub-optimal things with money to make us feel better. Liquor sales increase at Thanksgiving, too.
Eradicating materialism on Black Friday won’t eradicate materialism – doing so is stupid in any event – and giving a damn about how much is saved and how much is sold is like a scoring a football game between nerds and assholes. The problem isn’t that “Black Friday” exists or even that it is quantified, so much as the perception that it’s somehow necessary.
“Getting out of the house” is something you need if you’re a hostage or you’ve been snowed in. For everyone else, it’s an option glossed as an imperative. It’s a justification for ameliorating mild boredom or inconvenience. After travel, after spending a day with friends and loved ones preparing food and dealing with kids and ovens and dishes, making an effort to go do something else gets established as somehow even more leavening than just napping all day in a chair with a book on your chest. It only works if we buy into the narrative of Thanksgiving as something between a duty and a persecution.
Black Friday is at once a diversion and an inevitable force with which we must reckon our compliance, on the way through an obligatory slog invested with meaningless irritation. Those compelled to be at a factory outlet store hustling chinos, or even at Walmart, have to find excuses for feeling miserable. Everyone else there is there because it’s their job.
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