Special Ingredients: Just Be Thankful to Keep All Your Bits

It’s that time of year again, the time when we join together and participate in a communion that, sadly, only happens around this time of year. It’s a special time when we reflect not only on ourselves and what we have, but also the struggles and suffering of those who came before us, those brave men and women who faced personal harm and even death in a noble quest to save fifty cents on an electric razor for Dad, even though he has a perfectly functioning one at home.

I’m, of course, talking about the day after Thanksgiving shopping sales. The Friday after Thanksgiving is referred to as the Busiest Shopping Day of the Year, Black Friday, or Sadomasochists Shopper’s March of Doom. Whatever you call it, this day is known for churning out large, foaming crowds of normally-sane human beings who will gladly beat each other over the head to pay $47.98 for an off-brand DVD player, especially if the offer expires before noon.

The day after Thanksgiving wasn’t always like this. The affair started out, as most affairs do, with some experimental flirting, followed by fulfilling fornicating, and ending with exploitation, suffering, and large legal bills. It started with families who would host Thanksgiving dinner for excruciatingly extended family, including third cousin four times removed Gerald. These families would wake up the next day and find mounds of passed out relatives scattered all over house, struggling for air or, failing that, stuffing. The host family would look at each other and decide they really, really wanted to get out of the house.

After carefully stepping over Uncle Merv to get to the car keys, they took off for destinations unknown. After driving around for a while, they decided now is as good of time as any to do some Christmas shopping. After all, back at dinner, Aunt Martha was complaining about her rancid foot odor, and Cousin Cletus was talking about how he was “itchin’ to go a duck huntin’,” so now our host family knows exactly what to get everyone for Christmas, assuming they don’t decide to simply move to an undisclosed location after everyone regains consciousness and leaves.

When you factor in the amount of families nationwide that start shopping in order to avoid dazed, turkey-packed relatives, you can bet that retailers started noticing a slight jump in sales. A few of them thought there might be something to this, so they decided to start some sales the day after Thanksgiving and see where it went. Apparently, these sales were a success, so much so that even some of the undesired relatives started huffing their mashed potato-bloated carcasses into the stores.

Eventually, more retailers caught on, so everyone started rolling out some pretty good deals. The response was overwhelming, so they kept this up until an executive of one of the chains suggested opening the doors at five in the morning as a practical joke. Everyone in the board room had a good laugh until their jaws were permanently damaged when they dropped in reaction to the insane turn out of the sales. Not only were people coming at five in the morning, they were lining up outside hours before just to get in!

You can bet that the competition didn’t like this. In response, they started opening at five in the morning, and still MORE people started lining up. In order to outwit the other stores, one store started making some excellent-sounding offers with more strings attached than a puppet, and soon EVERYONE started doing it. Meanwhile, the executive who came up with the joke, realizing it went too far, tried to explain to the world that all of this madness was just a gag, but, sadly, he was killed before he could open his mouth by a stampeded of crazed shoppers trying to get at the limited quantities of jumbo crock pots.

Nowadays, the post-Thanksgiving sales are a tradition happily exercised by even the most rational human being who, for a brief time, has decided to become clinically insane. As I write these words, hundreds, maybe thousands of people around Toledo are currently camped out in front of stores, braving the cold and sleep deprivation just for an opportunity to get at a $127.98 MP3 player that, if purchased before 7:38 AM, that, after mail-in rebates that have a high probability of “getting lost in the mail,” comes out to only cost the consumer $125.21! Boy, is that worth standing outside in wind chills of negative thirty-five degrees for seven hours!

While there are some pretty good deals to be had out there, I never bother heading out, because I know these would be snatched up by hundreds of bargain-crazed shoppers that I could never hope to compete with. Even if I got there when the store opens, I’d still have to wait in line, and there’s no way any of these hardened consumers would even think of granting anyone any leniency. If there was a nuclear bomb set to go off inside the store, you better believe these shoppers would force the bomb squad to wait their turn to get in

I can’t blame them. It could be an elaborate trick of the city bomb squad to sneak in and get to the deals before anyone else. They’d have stacks of Street Walker Barbies piled up at the cash register, and the cashier would look at them questioningly and inquire about the bomb, sort of like this:

Cashier: “Uh, wasn’t there a bomb back there?”

Bomb Squad: “What? Oh, yeah, yeah. Terrible bomb.”

Cashier: “So, why are you here?”

Bomb Squad: “Uh, well, it turned out to be a water heater. Yeah, that’s it. Say, do you happen to have Slick Pimp Ken in stock?”

People will do just about anything to get at these deals. They’ll yell, shove, and even trample just to save a few dollars. These are normal, rational people who normally wouldn’t do this kind of thing. The abnormal, irrational people who would normally do these things, meanwhile, stay at home, because they don’t want to get mixed up with holiday shoppers.

I experienced the shopper situation first hand when I was ejected by a bouncer from Best Buy. I was at Q-Zar with my girlfriend, her brother, and a friend for a post-holiday lock-in. When it was over, we decided to swing by Best Buy to see if anyone was there. I was shocked to find the line extended hundreds of people back. I decided that I wanted in just to see what all the fuss was about, but before I could get inside to have a look, I was yelled at by a bouncer and told to get to the end of line.

This would have been fine if it weren’t for the self-righteous woman who paid a great compliment to the bouncer for keeping the riff-raff out, as if he was a solider keeping terrorist scum like me out in order to preserve her right to shop just below retail. I didn't pay her opinions much heed. After all, she was standing outside all night just to save five dollars on consumer electronics, so how smart could she be?

That’s what gets me about the after-Thanksgiving sales. If you sit down and do the math, most of the time, you’re not saving all that much money. In fact, a good amount of the time, I find that these sale prices cost MORE than bargains throughout the year. Really, if these people just waited a little longer or looked around a little more, they’d find that most of the merchandise they’re fighting for would be priced the same amount anyway, and they wouldn’t have to shed blood over it. Then again, I am talking about the American consumer here, so perhaps that’s just a moot point.

In any case, many Americans will be throwing their fists and their cash in stores today. I’ll probably head out later on, after the initial bloody clashes, stepping over the bodies of weaker shoppers in order to find some last-minute gifts, because I’ve already stocked-piled over the year or know exactly what I need. I suppose I shouldn’t criticize these shoppers too harshly, because they’re simply trying to save a little money in this cut-throat economy just to purchase presents for their family members, who will promptly get bored of them on Christmas day.

So my advice to those braving the shopping challenges is to remember to be civil about it. It’s only shopping, and a few dollars isn’t worth your dignity or safety. Treat others like human beings, don’t do something you’ll regret later, make sure the deals you’re hunting for are truly deals, and, above all, carry an iron mace with you at all times. Thank you.