Black Friday

People are insane

I mean really flipping crazy

One of my friends posted that he was out at 3 am waiting in the cold to buy a cheap laptop. I hope Angela knows that she has a good man there. He may be stinky, a little loud and crass, and not quite housebroken, but any man who will stand out in the cold with you on Black Friday is a good man. I think it is one of the classic definitions of true love. I have gotten ahead of myself.

Black Friday is the day after Thanksgiving. It is supposedly named because it is the day of the year that most retailers finally start turning a profit and ushers in the glut that is the Christmas season. All the retailers have massive sales to draw in the more dedicated and arguably insane consumers. People wake up ungodly early and shiver in arctic weather so they can hit these massive sales. Getting fifty dollars off of a  television is well worth risking losing digits to frostbite or worse, other Black Friday shoppers.

Every year I get this mental image straight from shark week of of a mass of swarming shoppers converging on merchandise. I picture grannies throwing elbows and left hooks to get the last Guilt Trip Elmo (because your kids will only love you if you spend elventy billion dollars for the year’s hot toy that they will play with for fifteen seconds) and getting trampled by the soccer moms trying to get the vacuum that cleans your whole house at the press of a button for 5% off.  Images of cat fights and shopping cart accidents dance through my head.  It is probably nothing like this but I like to keep that image in my head. It guarantees my continued abstinence from the holy American tradition.

I realize that I stereotype the typical Black Friday shopper as a cutthroat woman. I know this is very unenlightened of me but I have a good logical reason for this.  I have a theory! I love theories! I think women are evolutionarily built to shop. When we were more primitive and scratching life from the land and forests, women were the gatherers. While the men were out chasing things down with spears we stayed close to home to watch our spawn and gathering the rest of the food our families needed to continue to exist. They would come back with meat and we would provide the rest of the food we needed to survive. I postulate that shopping is the modern day gathering.  We are simply heeding that primal urge to provide for our families by going out into the forest and carrying home the things we need to survive.  If we leave a few bruises on some slow bitch that was in our way, it was just Darwinism at work.

Now I have no data to back this up but I also have another theory, men are starting to get involved in this feeding frenzy. There has always been some male participation by brow-beaten men dragged out of turkey stupors by eager wives or the geek really really wanting that new video card but I think there is an increase of  male participation in the Black Friday ritual for another reason. Men are starting to see getting deals and acquiring the newest and best whatsit as a modern form of hunting. Instead of bringing home a dead animal, they bring home the newest electronic/tool/other thing that men buy and they got it cheaper than their buddies.  I think this is a huge step to the liberation of man from the confines of their gender roles!

Today my family is going out for our Thanksgiving meal and doing a tiny bit of shopping. I am going to look forward to searching for the blood smears of people who were too slow or hogged a display. Its survival of the fittest baby.