Everyone has stopped talking about Black Friday. But I can’t stop thinking about it. Why? Well, for one thing, I survived the Thanksgiving-Black Friday crowds. I am a survivor. You can’t see me, but I’m belting out this phrase in my best Beyoncé voice. And I am still recovering. No joke.
Let me start by explaining that I have never, ever gone to a store as soon as it opens on Black Friday. (That includes my favorite store, Target.) I do all my shopping online. But this year was different. The decisions of many retailers to open on Thanksgiving gave me an opportunity to forgo that turkey sandwich and get my butt up and fight the crowds.
The intrigue of all the Black Friday hype had me dragging my husband to Walmart 10 minutes before their sale at 10 p.m. First let me preface this by informing you that I avoid Walmart every other day. But Thanksgiving was different. They had me at $5 Barbies.
My husband and I entered the store, and there were lines and lines of people beginning at the entrance of the store. We made our way toward the back of the store, because we knew that was where the video games and Barbies would be. (We did our homework before by looking at the map on Walmart.com.) As we approached the back of the store, we saw people crowding every area designated for the sale items. My husband situated himself 10 people deep from the video games, while, with three minutes to spare, I went to seek out the Barbies for my nieces.
I strolled the Walmart aisles taking note of the stations and of the people who had been brainwashed — like me — to cut their Turkey Day short and go into the war zone.
As soon as 10 p.m. hit, the employees started ripping the wrap from all the stations, and customers started pushing, yelling and knocking down all the items. It looked exactly how I had seen it previously on TV … crazy!
I would have recorded the grown-ass people fighting for Barbies, but I was busy picking the dropped Barbies up off the floor. And as for my husband, he stood back and watched people take each other out, before leisurely grabbing games from the toppled station on the floor.
It was an adrenaline rush. So much so that we ended up at Target at midnight, Old Navy at 1 a.m. and Best Buy at 2:30 a.m. The point of this story? Newspaper advertising, along with word of mouth, sold me on going shopping on Thanksgiving, and not necessarily because of the items on sale. (Because a $5 Barbie is totally not worth the black eye I avoided while picking Barbies up off the floor.) And some say print advertising is dead. Shame, shame, shame.
Now I can say I am a Black Friday survivor. But I’ll stick to Cyber Monday from now on.
Photo: Found on Home Tech Tell
