112615-- Amusing misprint on Black Friday memo I found this on a display of DVD's at a local Black Friday sale. Note the second-to-last line. Hm-- 18,000 years, huh? Well, perhaps by then that copy of
The Hunger Games: Mockingjay (part 1) will be marked down from an orange tag to a blue tag, and I can save five or six bucks.
So each year after the big Thanksgiving feast, a load of turkey in my belly and a song in my heart, I hit the stores each year with Mom, my brother, and his baby mama, and we load up on hundreds of dollars' worth of electronics, kitchen aids, clothes,
and just lately with our new addition, baby supplies. We have it down to an absolute science, almost a military operation. We decide what we're going to get beforehand, and everybody is then assigned a station. We spread out, assume our post, and jealously guard that item with our lives. When they announce over the speakers that it's six o'clock, we start grabbing and loading up our carts with a fervor. We work in shifts so someone will always be available to relieve whosoever is watching our purchases so they can leap into the fray and grab their fill. We four then meet at the central hub with our booty in tow. I always come away with twenty or thirty dollars' worth of movies-- I tend to lean Pixar-heavy, as well as superheroes and anything with Adam Sandler or a Disney Channel cutie before she turned 19 and her morals went straight out the window.
My brother's gal did wonder aloud on the drive back home, after six long hours and everyone in our party footsore, backs twisted and aching, cranky, and squeaking out hot toxic turkey gas, what insidious person came up with this whole thing to separate folks from their hard-earned dollars.
So we looked it up. Supposedly it's an accounting term (i.e. to be "in the black", or to have your ledgers fat and flush with profit) although it's also suggested some anonymous policeman came up with the term over fifty years ago, and not one of endearment, exactly, which is why merchants insisted on pushing the kinder, gentler, profit margin angle. Of course, Mayberry shoppers were more likely to expect to see a busted fender in a road accident than a cracked skull or getting their asses stabbed each year fighting over the last Monster High doll.* Either folks weren't as nutty back then, or they were, but we didn't hear about it.
Remember those
freaks and creepazoids I mentioned before? They come out full force on this day looking for bargains.
Do you know how many people get whacked on Black Friday every year? I'll never forget, a couple years back, those two ladies who flipped their shit at one of these things and went running down the aisle with a cartful of dish towels, laughing merrily. I was inspired, in fact, to write the story "The Old Man and the C-Notes" (
Nov 2013) after witnessing this display of lunacy. I gotta ask, what the hell does someone do with four dozen towels? Although, my mom saw some identical-print towels two weeks later at a secondhand shop up in Paragould. She suspects these gals were buying them for pennies on the dollar here and then trying to resell them to suckers for three bucks. Pretty shrewd, I gotta admit.