I have never participated in any of the Black Friday shopping hoopla. Ever.
Well... There were those few years during college that I worked in retail, so I was often scheduled to work during the big kick-off to Christmas shopping. It is different being on the cash register side of the check-out stand. It is a simpler, kinder, and gentler role than that of the hunter of the bargains. Black Friday (as we know it today) didn't even really exist back then. Or if it did, I must have blocked it from my memory.
A quick Google fact-check revealed that the term "Black Friday" originated in the 1960s in Philadelphia, but the use of the phrase didn't become widespread until decades later.
When I was a kid, department stores would maybe open up at 9 AM the morning after Turkey Day. Or 8 AM would have been a really early start. Store openings got earlier and earlier until finally, in 2011, several retailers like Best Buy, Target, and Kohl's opened up at midnight. This was an unprecedented, bold move. Not to be outdone, Walmart opened at 8 PM on Thanksgiving Day the following year. (As a side note, you could not pay me to go to a W-Mart on Thanksgiving Day, or the day after, or the day after that! It is not going to happen. IT. IS. NOT. WORTH. IT.) This year, many stores opened at 6 PM on Thanksgiving Day. Next year, we might find that these retailers simply never close. Maybe they will start serving turkey dinner with all the trimmings to bargain hunters and huntresses. Then again, maybe not. This might encourage food fights.
Soooo, I suppose I can still claim B. Friday non-participation, even though I did take my youngest daughter shopping. We opted to go at 8 PM on Thursday, so TECHNICALLY we didn't shop on Black Friday.
My dearest sister is the one who originally agreed to take the teens shopping, then I half-heartedly agreed to go along. We thought that perhaps these two girlies would be dissuaded from future B. Friday excursions if they saw firsthand how crowded and not-worth-the-effort getting "malled" really is. And the hope was that the price reductions really wouldn't be all that great.
Miss Millie and her friend Mak were quite eager to find some of the AWESOME deals like the ones that their friends had boasted about finding during last year's Black Friday shopping conquests. (These stories could have been exaggerated, of course; kind of like a fisherman's big fish tales...) It's true, there were a few good deals out there, but the checkout lines were r-e-a-l-l-y long. For me, it is not worth waiting in a long line with irritated shoppers if I'm only going to save a few bucks.
There were a few department stores and small specialty shops that did not open up for the craziness. I applaud their stance on keeping a holiday a holiday. I made sure to take note of those stores so I could go back at a later date to give them my support.
As for checking things off of my shopping list, I am loading up the Amazon sleigh and letting the nice folks at UPS, Fed-Ex and the USPS do all my delivering. I think I'm more of a Cyber Monday kind o' gal.
