Black Friday … Try Toxic Friday

By Jeff Hagedorn

The day after Thanksgiving has long been billed as Black Friday in America. Not because of any notorious historical event, and not because African Americans suddenly take over (but conservatives are pretty tense right now). It’s called Black Friday in reference to the fact that retailers are likely to finally be “in the black” once all those shoppers fill the stores with their Christmas cash.

I must admit that there are few things I hate more than shopping. Oh, I’ll still take shopping over a prostate exam, or a root canal, but a regular dentist visit for a filling would beat out shopping by a wide margin (especially if I get the gas). So for me to spend time complaining about Black Friday is kind of like some guy complaining about getting run over by a car after lying down in the road. I could have avoided it by simply staying home, just like the guy with the treadmark hairdo could have stayed out of traffic.

Notwithstanding my own stupidity for being drawn out of my cave on such a hated occasion, it is simply staggering to observe the unwashed mass of mouth-breathers that crowd the retail-driven orgy that is Christmas shopping season. It’s like Darwin lost a bet. You get whole families – from the toddler that simply won’t stop screaming, to Grandma in her electric wheelchair that’s as wide as a dump truck – clustered together for fear that one of its extraneous members might break free, clogging up every pedestrian area from the malls to the box stores. And to make matters worse, once they’ve found that extra special bargain, they all stand in the checkout together, likely to help Daddy figure out how to use the credit card reader (which none of them know how to do, unless the teenage daughter has failed to escape), or to ensure that Grandma’s wheelchair successfully impedes all of humanity, as it has thus far only previously held back their immediate family.

The cashiers must have a Quaalude IV hidden under their smocks, because I’d only make it about ten minutes without beating some asshole to death with a beef log if I had to deal with the mass dumbass invasion without some form of sedation. From time to time you see a cashier heave a sigh, or turn away to cough (while really muttering some profanity into their sleeve), but overall, I don’t recall seeing a single cashier or store clerk whack somebody with a food item or electronic device. I, for one, would try to use the laser scanner as a death ray.

And traffic – dear Jeebus, where to start.

Apparently Grandma is doing the driving for the whole gang, and since she’s used to her 3 mph wheelchair, she doesn’t want that cargo van to get out of control. It cannot travel in a straight line until the turn signal is flashing, and if it happens to turn the same direction as the signal, it triggers the self-destruct sequence. Street lights and traffic control devices are treated like suggestions, to be disregarded when inconvenient, and their half of a four-lane road consists of one half of the right lane and one half of the left lane, just as their parking spots are defined by a white line under the precise middle of the vehicle. They must drop off all of their passengers immediately in front of the store entrance before assuming their handicapped parking space ten feet away, and the loading ritual involves backing the van up to the doors so that grandma can use the wheelchair lift to effectively block the exit and prevent emergency responders from accessing the building at the same time.

The management of the retail establishments wallow in this crapulence, following customers around the store asking if they may be of any assistance. I must admit that I was tempted to tell the manager at Best Buy that he could assist me greatly if he would bust out a machine gun and weed out the folks browsing the small-ticket items. Maybe a ricochet would result in a “scratch and dent” discount on that 98 inch LCD HDTV?

The restaurants are packed with folks that clearly aren’t used to dining in public. You get more grunts and groans than Fat Albert having sex with a wild rhino, and you can sense the fact that the waitresses would love to jab a knife into a customer or two after having to change an order four times before the numbskull decides which cheeseburger he or she actually wants. And I’d bet dollars against dimes that at least half of the monosyllabic morons don’t have a clue how to calculate a tip – you can see it in the faces of the wait staff!

Overall, I managed the whole ordeal by constantly taking a step back and admiring the mess as one admires a wreck along the side of the road after you’ve been sitting in a traffic jam for an hour. You’re pissed as it’s affecting you, but once you find out the problem you slow down to take it all in. Of course I also concluded that I will be doing a lot more shopping on the internet this year….