Black Friday

There is a little piece inside of each and every one of us that is CRAZY! I am no exception, in fact my piece is larger than most people's but I'm ok with that and have learned to embrace this quality that I posses! Well, let me just say that the CRAZIES were in full form on the morning/day known as Black Friday. I should really do the research and find out who coined the phrase, because one would think it would be Green Friday (green as in money spent, and money saved), but whoever coined the term BLACK needs a cookie! I am gonna guess that black is to represent the mass chaos, pandemonium and insanity that is the day after Thanksgiving in the United States. I wonder if other countries and cultures have an equivalent?  But if they don't I seriously recommend coming and observing this cultural phenomenon, it's more entertaining than the WWE and definitely not staged!




My girlfriend Jules and I got up at 4am (though we originally intended to be at Target by then), made our way to Timmy Hos (Tim Hortons, the ones in Manhattan are nothing like the ones in B-Lo), grabbed our coffee then headed off to the madness. We should have known by the fact that we were in a drive-thru line that was out into the street that the day was going to be crazy. My saying that makes it seem like I've never done Black Friday shopping before, I definitely have, but it's just been a while. While in the food line the clock turned 5am and at that moment we could see the cars that were across the street at Wal-Mart zipping out of the parking lot. This not only meant that people had been there insanely early, but that they were ridiculously fast in acquiring their stupid electronics and cheap plastic toys and were on to the next store.

We got to Target at about 5:15am.  The store had been opened for 15minutes and already there were people in line to check out. We thought our best bet would be to head to the electronics department to see what was left that we might want to get a good deal on. There wasn’t anything that we were dying to have, but a deal is a deal. I mean $8 for a season of Friends, or Sex and the City or House! Screw holiday shopping, I was stocking up my collection. Thankfully the DVDs had large stocks, which is not the same for the flat screen televisions, digital cameras and blue ray players. The crowd around the electronics counter was so huge that people were jumping up and down on each other from 15 feet back. It got to the point where electronics were literally being thrown into the air and being snatched and fought over by multiple hands. It reminded me of the scene in Jingle All the Way with Arnold Schwarzenegger where everyone is fighting over a damn doll! This was just the beginning of the comic and entertaining morning I was going to partake in!

Quickly we realized that the only way we were going to survive this store and the crazy masses would be to jump into line and take turns shopping while the other held our spot. Once we found the end of the line, which only took about 5 whole minutes and multiple treks up and down the aisles, we were in a standstill for twenty-five minutes. I took this as a prime opportunity to people watch. There were the young adults who were stocking up on gifts for the family, single mothers with carts full of toys, trashy Cheektowagans with an assortment of 'trendy' clothes and cheap electronics, old ladies with massage chairs and Williamsville Jews with rolls of Hanukkah wrapping paper.



I couldn't help but laugh out loud while on the phone with my mother (who was getting ready to work at Bath and Body works in Texas at 6am her time) at this woman who was bitching on the phone about how she just spent the last twenty minutes in a line to nowhere! Literally the line she was in went in a full circle before anyone realized that it wasn't a line! AMAZING!  She was talking so loudly it was as if she thought one of the 700 people in the check-out line was going to have sympathy for her and let her cut! FAT CHANCE! She then continued to say that she absolutely hated Target and was never going to shop there ever again. Really?! Seriously?! Don’t lie, you and I both know that you will be back tomorrow, and two times next week. I just think it's hysterical that when people are pissed off that they got screwed that they go to the extremes! If you were really that upset and thought that you had been wronged by the Target establishment you would have left your cart full of items and gone to your next destination...though it's not like it would have made a difference to the store, they were making probably a million dollars in two hours!



After our two hour line shopping experience, we checked out a few other stores, but by that point none were as crazy and packed as Target. I'm pretty sure that they were packed for the 48 straight hours that the sale was going on! But its Target, so as annoying as it all may be let's not forget that it's an amazing store, one that I miss daily!