You can generally find the same, or in many cases better, “deals” online. There is really no reason to subject yourself to the madness.
I also feel badly for the people made to work these days. In my area stores open mid-day Thanksgiving. There are probably many employees that don’t mind it, but I’m also certain there are probably many that would rather be spending time with their families than being stampeded by fools thinking they’re finding some great “deal.”
I used to work at a Walmart on the grocery side and it was funny on black friday.
On the other side of the store, there were fights breaking out and my side was deserted.
There are some people who are black belt shoppers and love that stuff.
More power to them.
I love shopping on Black Friday…at home, in my pjs, online. 
Seriously, if you wait around, there’ll be other, even better deals later on. What really kills me is the new Thanksgiving Day sales is that the big wigs who came up with the idea to be open most likely aren’t going to work. They’ll be at home with their families, enjoying dinner. Fuckers.
I’m going to be the voice of the repressed minority. As a white, middle class male, I really enjoy Black Friday. I go in, get what I want and get out. We are active Camel Camel Camel users and can wait indefinitely for something to go on sale so we don’t embrance the “merican-style consumerism”, but we used to get many of our kids’ toys on Black Friday.
We always get yards and yards of flannel and fleece at JoAnn’s and make ~10 pairs of pajamas and robes for kids, relatives, friends, and offspring over the rest of the year. Ace Hardware always has great small trinkets and tool sets that are very useful for myself or guests too.
My favorite Black Friday experience was arriving at 7:55pm for the 8pm Sears opening on Thanksgiving- there was a line several hundred people long at the main entrance where they were going to hand out tickets for some of their big items. I waited at the side entrance next to the appliances and tools all by my lonesome. All doors were opened simultaneously, I walked 10 feet into the store and grabbed a $20 toolbox went up to the counter and said I also wanted to buy SKU ###-### (which was a black friday fridge deal). She said, “Is that one of the ticket things?” I replied, “I didn’t want to wait in the long line. Is there any way to do it without a ticket?” At this moment the herd sprint comes from the main door arrives into the area. And she says, “sure, let’s get you out of here. They are only giving away half of the ticketed items in case any problems arise.” Two minutes later, I was out the door. 150 seconds of awesome to get my dream fridge and replace the 30 year energy eater!
Same here. It’s always seemed to me that going to such great lengths to get a deal, and getting excited about it, meant that you couldn’t really afford things at their normal price. Not the kind of thing I would expect a non-low income person to be (in effect) bragging about.
About 6 years ago I worked as a cashier at KMart through the whole holiday season, since I started in October.
I worked at the register on Black Friday for 9 hours without a single break. The registers kept crashing, then they had to be rebooted, and the whole purchase rung up again. It was enough to make me realize, that I will not ever work a retail job again in my life.
Absolutely! Shopping at 10 pm in my jammies is the best way to shop. 
And, the years we don’t make the 12 hour trip to see the family, I can spend what I would have spent in travel expenses to have gifts gift-wrapped and shipped to the family.
I’ve never done the “get up at 5:00AM and line up with the mob in front of the store entrance” thing. But I am not against “retail entertainment” on the Friday after Thanksgiving. You’ve got the day off. You spent Thursday sitting on your ass (if you didn’t have to cook), catching up with family, pigging out, feeling grateful. Sure, on the day afterwards it would be nice to take everyone out for a long stroll in the quiet wilderness. But Aunt Edith ain’t a fan of the great outdoors. Plus, it’s cold. So why not go to the mall? It will be busy, but that’s kinda what makes it fun. It’s better than watching yet another marathon of Real Housewives of Whatever.
Yeah, it’s part of what makes me so sad when I see it, Americans rioting over cheap crap like something from the third world.
I call the day after Thanksgiving “Go Nowhere and Spend Nothing Day.” I take the day off and stay home. Usually. This year I got a free ticket to a matinee of Sherlock starring David Arquette with three other people, so I’m going somewhere and probably going to eat/drink after. I think we’ll be able to avoid any shopping crap, though.
I think Black Friday shoppers are idiots - and kind of jerks - because maybe, just maybe, if they didn’t show up some of the stores would give their employees the whole damn holiday off. It sucks to have to try and get some quality family time and then have to go to work at 6pm or 8pm (midnight at a place where there isn’t usually a night crew!), or not get any time at all when the store’s open all day.
Black Friday morning is spent recovering from Thanksgiving; I can’t get up for the earliest doorbusters. I have gone out in previous years & come home with exactly… nothing.
How about Japanese-style consumerism? This kind of thing happens here on New Year’s Day. A tradition since the Meiji Era. People line up at many stores for “Lucky Bags” filled with mostly leftover inventory (and few treasures) sometimes costing 100’s of dollars. Queues start forming from the night before. Yes, New Year’s Eve, the most important holiday on the Japanese calendar.
Some YouTube videos:
News Report
Department Store
Black Friday is the ultimate manipulation of a gullible populace intended to separate them from their hard-earned money.
Early on it was just a big shopping day because a lot of people had the day off. Then when the economy tanked the retailers milked it for all it was worth. I remember when I was young (1960s or so), there were no sales until after Christmas. This business about sales starting before Christmas (now even before Halloween) came around during the first big recession in the 1980s, I think, as retailers got desperate.
Now it’s just out of control. Shoppers are out of control, businesses are out of control. Hats off to REI for closing on Black Friday and telling people to just go do something outside.
I despise Black Friday and I’d rather spend a weekend in jail than a single day shopping! No deal or giveaway can lure me near a retail store on Black Friday!
But back in 2012, I learned that Black Friday is a GREAT day to buy a car! I was the only one at the dealership from the time I arrived around 1pm until they closed at 7pm as I was finishing up the paperwork. I bought a 2012 Mazda CX-9 GT with a sticker price of $39,385 and just two weeks earlier, the best they could do was $32,100. Then I showed up on Black Friday and I bought it for $29,308 plus sales tax! $10,077 off a $39,385 vehicle is a sweet deal, IMHO!
My sister is a big Black Friday shopper. Gets out early, stands in lines and all that. She still enjoys the “hunt” and when I ask her later how it went, she always reports getting whatever she was after. Mainly big sales on Lego stuff and/or some doorbuster electronic (TV, game console, etc).
I do most of my shopping online and just cruise the deal sites looking for prices I’ll bite at. I’m not a fan of the whole “Open 6pm Thanksgiving” nonsense and, from stuff I read last year, many stores didn’t even do well combining thin sale margins with paying employees time and a half. But now if they’re NOT the ones to open then everyone might go to the OTHER store that’s open. Prisoner’s dilemma and all that – they should really just agree to all stay closed on Thanksgiving from an economic standpoint but that’ll never happen.
Yes, the whole thing is very stupid. I got an e-mail last year from an appliance store about a great Black Friday deal on a HDTV. So on Black Friday, I called the store, asked if they had any of them left in-stock and I ordered it by phone and they delivered it to my home and set it up. I didn’t go to the story at all. What for, so I could be part of the insane crowd and have to carry a TV home? No thanks. Ordering by phone or online is the way to go.
People who go to those stores on Black Friday place no value on their time. I’ve seen articles that explain the discounts making it worth it are a myth, since you can do the same or better online and have it shipped to you.
You could be right; that would certainly make more logical sense. The people in my social circle who do the whole “event” are the ones with the cash. The lower income folks usually have to work, or choose to because they can get time and a half.
It would be interesting to see if there is data to show what income brackets are most likely to participate. If popular opinion is to be believed, the cheapest people are the ones who can afford to spend money.
Black Friday isn’t about frugality–that would mean genuine value, and sometimes not buying anything at all. It’s about shopping as a sport.
I did the black friday thing exactly once. GF wanted/needed a new TV and DVD player about then, and decided to go for BF doorbuster deals offered by Sears…at 3AM.
Se got to Sears about 2:45 and there was a line 100 yds. long outside one door. It was cold, so we decided to wait in the car.
We went for the end of the line when they opened the door, but just before we got there, they unlocked another door next to us, so we jumped the whole line/mob
So I was the first one in the Electronics department, and grabbed a salesman. The sale was completed for dock pickup by maybe 3:05, and we had the stuff by 3:30. We had breakfast at Denny’s and went home for a nap.
I figure that used up a lifetime of luck, so I’ll probably never again be a BF shopper.
I doubt it’s retailer desperation so much as I’d bet that the face of retailing has changed over the past half-century, and the way that worked in the 1960s is no longer very effective in today’s retail world, and arketing has become much more savvy than it was back then. Hell, the Bass model wasn’t even developed academically until the late 1960s, and probably wasn’t put into effect until sometime after that, and it’s one of the cornerstones of modern marketing.
I suspect that someone noticed “Hey! We get a lot of business on the Friday after Thanksgiving. Maybe we should run a sale so that we get even more relative to our competition!”
And from there, it probably just ballooned- once one store runs a sale, the rest have to match or be left in the cold, or so the thinking goes. These days, I suspect that many places are already running on very thin profit margins, so they have to resort to weird and sketchy gimmicks like advertising $100 50" HDTVs!" and then having 2 of that model on hand at that price. Or they do like I suggested earlier, and mark things up ahead of time so they can put them on “sale” later.
There has to be somewhere they’re making their money on these things, and they aren’t the deals themselves, assuming the merchandise is of customary quality, so I’d guess they’re trying to get people to come in with the bait of a good deal on one thing, and then hoping they’ll sell them other stuff while they’re there.
Grocery stores do it with turkeys at Thanksgiving and Xmas; shop at their stores enough ahead of time, and they give you a free turkey. So they get you to do some defined quantity of shopping, and then hope you buy your stuffing ingredients, cranberry sauce, etc… while you’re picking up your free turkey.