Thursday, December 3, 2009
Black Friday: Was it worth it?
Posted By Brandon Burt on December 3, 2009, 5:01 AM
One of my friends just learned that a co-worker rose before 4 a.m. last Friday in order to shop at a dozen stores. "I cannot conceive of ever doing that," my friend said. "You would have to pay me a thrillion bucks or someone's life'd have to be on the line." ---
Considering that it's pretty much all I can do to shop at one store and still cook dinner, it seems pretty inconceivable to me, too.
I'm not a big fan of "Black Friday." The name%uFFFDsounds ominous to me, and I resent the fact that it adds a sense of impending doom to my Thanksgiving.
I'm also not convinced that supporting "the economy" is really the moral imperative people make it out to be anyway. If our economy's health really depends on a yearly media-fueled shopping frenzy, maybe it's not something worth our support.
So we've pretty much managed to avoid all the Black Friday madness. People get killed that way!
My only other brush with it this year involved my nonlegal husband Dave's sister's friend, who often spends Thanksgiving with us.
She's nice, and I like her. But this year, she surprised all of us by announcing she had to go to bed early so she could get to Smith's Marketplace by 5 a.m., where everything was half-off.
I think she noticed we were all looking at her aghast, so she quickly added that she wasn't even doing holiday gift shopping; it was just a personal tradition for her to "buy all her socks for the year" that way.
Now, I'm not one of those fancy-sock people -- I buy my socks in multi-packs and I think they average out to about $2/pair. And they last a long time! So, even if I were buying like 10 pairs, I would have a hard time justifying getting up at 4 a.m. the morning after Thanksgiving just to save ten bucks.
So, all you Black Friday shoppers -- I'm curious: What do you get out of the whole experience? I'd like to know.
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