Turkey smothered in gravy, mashed potatoes, stuffing, and an array of various pies covered tables across the nation on Thanksgiving. Most people usually eat with their loved ones and students returning home from college are excited to see old friends.
However, instead of taking the break to relax, thousands of people went to sleep at 5 p.m. or chugged back a few 5-Hour-Energy Shots in order to prepare for their favorite part of the holiday: Black Friday.
If Valentine's Day is the holiday created by Hallmark to cash in on love, Black Friday is every retail store's wet dream.
For three out of the past five years, I've worked Black Friday at retail stores. I didn't just work at some local mall; I worked at the Woodbury Common Premium Outlets in Central Valley, N.Y., one of the largest and most visited outlet malls in the world.
The problem with working at such a huge tourist attraction is that you have to deal with customers who yell at you when you don't speak their language. They throw clothes around your store like it's their closet, and leave your dressing rooms smelling more like a dirty bathroom than a place to change.
Even many of these foreign customers save thousands by making shopping stops on a bargain holiday, they still try to persuade, bully, or manipulate their way into getting whatever additional discount they can.
Retail addicts, trying to save as much money as they can on designer jeans and diamond-encrusted jewelry, have yelled me at in Chinese, Spanish, Portuguese, and English.
Consumers come from across the globe for a holiday they don't celebrate just to spend more money than I make in a year in less than an hour. The parking lot is usually filled by 6 p.m. on Thanksgiving and families set up tents and sleeping bags by the stores they want to hit up first.
People treat Black Friday as though the Apocalypse will happen at any moment. Some run around the store like chickens with their heads cut off, knocking over walls of earrings and clothes that the employees will have to pick up. But before us workers can do that, we have to help a customer that pictures us as human calculators and wants us to add up the 30 things piled in their hands and tell them how much it will all cost with the added discount.
So we're maids, calculators, personal shoppers, and of course secret agents. Since there's hundreds of people in the store at a time, there are going to be some that steal. Our managers talk to us for about an hour before D-Day on how to pick out thieves, how to watch them, and how to stop them. Basically, you have to be James Bond.
On top of that, the lines at the cash registers are about 20 people long, and each person comes up with a coupon or a promotion that they misread – or pretended to have misread – and then get mad when their pile of stuff is "too expensive."
People argue till they are blue in the face just to save an extra $2 and take it out on the employees as if they are responsible for the prices.
It's like Occupy Commercialism.
What do these two Occupy movements have in common? For one thing, there's pepper spray. A woman pepper sprayed about 20 people just to get an Xbox 360 first at a Walmart in California. She was probably inspired by the UC Davis incident.
At another Walmart in Arizona, a 54-year-old man was arrested, pushed to the ground, and knocked unconscious by a police officer because the man was suspected of stealing. The customer had only tucked a videogame into his waistband to ensure other shoppers wouldn't take it from him. The incident went viral, and showed his grandson watching helplessly as the man lay in a pool of his own blood while being handcuffed, and then carried off.
Walmart may likely have the most incidents to occur on Black Friday over the past 10 years. There were armed robberies in the parking lot, girl fights that resulted in hospital trips, and a woman being trampled and paralyzed as a result. Then in 2008, a Walmart employee was trampled to death. Black Friday and Walmart just don't seem to mix very well.
Are these deals really worth risking your wellbeing?
I went shopping on Friday afternoon, after all of the intense shoppers were already long gone. However, it was still packed and smelled faintly of the Buffalo Zoo.
I got pushed, shoved, and had rude comments thrown at me by shoppers and Forever21 employees alike. It was hard to get angry with the employees, though. I've been in their position way too many times. It sucks. Still, at least I shopped without getting trampled, shot, or stabbed, which all in all makes it a successful Black Friday trip.
There are a couple of options on how to spend your Thanksgiving holiday. There's shopping with your pajamas on and a computer in front of you, no shopping at all, or standing in endless lines with people who are grumpy, sleep deprived, impatient and probably hopped up on coffee or energy drinks (maybe both).
If you chose the latter option, it's a breeding ground for trouble. It's like going to a Steelers versus Ravens football game. Eventually someone is going to get punched.
Email: ecwhite@buffalo.edu
