Black Friday Can Fuck Off

The BBQ Pit
1

I got my first crap retail job back in September (Circuit City, they were hiring and paid $8.25 and I wouldn’t get off work and smell like grease) and I didn’t start really hating it until today.

Shoppers are self-important assholes. Especially on the wonderful (not) day of Black Friday, aka day after Thanksgiving when everyone feels the need to shop at 5 am.

I had to come back to Columbia from St. Louis last night directly from my family’s Thanksgiving affair. I had to be at work at 3am.

At 4 am, about 100 people were lined up outside our store. People were fucking running.

About thirty seconds after we opened the doors at 5 am, the store was so crowded it was impossible to fucking move.

Do people that go shopping on this day NOT expect the stores to be crowded? Because I swear no one that shopped at our store this morning had any idea. They were all fucking pissed that all the lines took an hour plus and that we ran out of the products in the ad quickly. Yes, we have EVERY register open. All but like 2 of our employees are here right now. Seriously, have you not ever been shopping on this day or not heard about how it is? I had what felt like 50 people at a time asking me questions or asking for shit or yelling at me for one reason or another about things obviously completely out of my control. Every time I turned around I had five people clamoring for my attention, wanting to find them shit or get them a camera (I work in the camera department. The cameras are locked up. No you cannot take them and walk around. You can’t any other day. You have to wait in line and hope it’s still there when you get to the register, just like everyone else.) No, if you’re not in line I will not ‘save’ a camera for you when there are other people waiting. First come first serve is always the deal on these sort of days. Yes, the ad says no rainchecks. Quit bitching at me because the line is long. Of course it is, half the fucking town and its environs are all here trying to get the piece of shit Casio camera on sale for $150. Quit fucking shoving the ad in my face and pointing at shit, I know how to understand words. Stop being fucking impatient, there are 80234583524875 other people here too, you are not special. Don’t go shopping on this day and expect a leisurely experience. Don’t come at 10 am and expect all the stuff marked down a LOT on sale to still be here, we’ve been open for 5 hours. Don’t bitch and complain about how you’re spending money and I’m making it when I am trying to calm you down by saying we understand you are annoyed by the wait, we’ve been here since 3 and will be here for 16 hours plus. Yeah, I won’t even make anywhere close to enough today to afford what you’re buying, bitch. If you weren’t such a cheapass you wouldn’t have to stand in line today. Go home with your snarky ass, they don’t pay me enough to be nice to you. I just had to start walking away from people so I didn’t blow up and curse them out. It’s so annoying when people are cursing you out and you can’t say shit back! Argh. By 6 am I had a migraine so bad I almost puked.

Ugh. It was just a shitty, loooong day. 16 hours long, after 4 hours sleep. I will NEVER EVER shop on this day. Fuck it. It’s not even worth it! I just don’t get these peoples’ expectations. It is the absolute craziest shopping day of the year. Every store is gonna be packed! Don’t like it, stay home. That simple. Shop online or something. It’s like they expected to be in and out in 10 minutes like a normal day. Umm…no. Our normal budget for my department is maybe 5-8 grand, today it was 50k and we hit it by noon! That’s a lot of cheap cameras. I will also never work another Black Friday. Fucking hell. I only got 30 hours in St. Louis because of the crap job.

So in short, fuck Black Friday. Worst day of the year. It’s disgusting how angry people can get over some material possessions. OH MY GOD YOU ARE OUT OF THIS CAMERA? WELL WHAT THE FUCK? Um it’s just a fucking camera, call next week I’m sure we’ll have some more. People act like their head is in the guillotine and I’ll drop the blade if THEY DON’T GET THIS EXACT THING RIGHT FUCKING NOW BEFORE ANYONE ELSE JKWEFHKFGWEHUEGR!!! It’s just sad how Christmas is now about fighting people and stealing shit from them at stores. We had people ganking cameras we had laying out for people in line. We had to stop laying them out and instead go to the case for every individual person when they got to the register. Dickfucks. You have a month left to buy shit, calm the fuck down already! Thank god we didn’t have any PS3s or Wiis.

2

I can totally sympathize with you!

From the shopper’s point of view, it’s no walk in the park either. The stores are so jammed that you can barely breathe, much less move. Other shoppers seem to have never even heard of the concepts of courtesy or patience. Waiting for your turn is for…someone else?

What’s up with the people who bring their strollers? They bug me the most. They always seem to be oblivious to the flow of traffic inside the stores. Either they’re parking the damn thing in the middle of an aisle so that no one can get around them, or they’re using it as some kind of battering device to run up the backside of the person walking in front of them. Can’t they leave the kid and the stroller home with someone while they do their bargain hunting? Sheesh!

For the past five years I’ve been doing my Christmas shopping on line. It’s a much better experience!

3

My daughter sells jewelry in an upscale department store’s ‘fine jewelry’ department. She’s been there almost 3 years now. Last night, she went to work some kind of ‘bring a buddy’ program with a friend of hers that works at a Banana Republic in an outlet mall, then get to her store at 5 am.

She came home today at about 2 this afternoon, went straight to her room and collapsed into a nap. When she got up, her mom said, in a cheerful voice"So, was work fun today?"

The coldest, deepest blankest stare ever came from the child. I thought for a moment I glimpsed the face of Pure Evil in her eyes.

4

If the managers had any sense, they’d hire security and only let a limited number of people in the store at a time and then, as customers left, let additional people in. They could hand out flyers answering all the FAQs you were asked today about no rainchecks, etc.

I don’t understand wanting crap so badly so as to get up in the middle of the night to stand in line.

Sorry you had such a crappy day.

5

That was a DAMN GOOD rant.

As a Canadian, I totally don’t understand the whole concept of Black Friday. Why does the day after Thanksgiving have to be such a huge shopping day? Is it any less arbitrary than, say, November 29? Or December 4?

6

You have my sympathy. I did my part; I stayed home.

I’ve never shopped on Black Friday, or on the weekends from mid-November to Christmas.

Are the profits that good, to justify extra staff, extra hours before, to set up, and then extra staff and hours to re-mark prices after? Not to mention the ill will when quantities don’t last and customers stand in long lines?

7

I cannot for the life of me understand why anyone would want to shop at 5am the day after Thanksgiving. Do they think they live in Soviet Russia and that there are going to be aisle after aisle of empty shelves if they don’t start lining up at 3am?

8

Oh hell, my sister-in-law usually starts pounding coffee after Thanksgiving dinner, to gear up for driving to the Citadel outlet mall at around midnight. The stores open around then (or a bit later, I can’t remember) and by 6:00 am she has done all of her shopping for the holidays.

It’s nuts. I was going to go with her this year, but she is on bed rest and couldn’t go. I just want to see it once.

And by the way, she also has complaints about people with kids in strollers at 3:00 am!!!

:eek:

9

Should have come to my mall. Small crowds, no lines at all in my store. Our budget for the day was $500, we made $800 and there were long stretches of time with no people at all! Our sister stores in the suburban malls were making $5000 and more, but we don’t have that kind of crowd in downtown Cleveland. We really need to make $600 tomorrow to make our month, and possibly a small bonus, and keep our jobs after the first of the year. I can promise you the shortest waiting time for engraving in our entire chain, and hey, we’ll take phone orders!

The big-box stores with their early-bird specials have made our day-after-Thanksgiving sales not as important as they once were. We’ll get busier when the people who are forced to go to those stores at those times to get a deal come to their senses and return to shopping in the mall…and once our core client base comes back to work from their long weekend. But until then…I’m not busy, I can help you!

10

I have to tell you how stunned I was when I first encountered Black Friday after moving to the States from Alberta. I even partook. I HATED IT. I have not shopped on Black Friday since.

The day after Thanksgiving is usually a day off, so people take advantage of it.

11

The sad part is we actually went out and worked the lines from 4-5, giving out vouchers for the limited ‘hot’ items (cheap computers and TVs mainly) so there would be no fights and had people ask us questions. We told them where everything they wanted would be in the store and even gave out maps, fliers with the free stuff they could get and how they qualified for it, etc. Let people know what vouchered items we were out of so they wouldn’t be expecting to get it. But people still freaked the fuck out.

I think if we had security keeping people out of the store they’d be even more pissed because then they could bitch and say “Well I didn’t get in in time to get what I wanted because you kept us outside” blah blah blah. I have some ideas for my store for when they do it next year - it was quite disorganized. I think we should advertise clearly with huge lettering LIMITED QUANTITIES NO RAINCHECKS EVERYTIHG IN THE FUCKING AD NEEDS A VOUCHER SO IF YOU WANT IT STAND IN FUCKING LINE CALMLY AND NO BITCHING THANKS.

12

Oh yay, another teenage angst thread, just what we need. Waaa! Waaa!

13

The reason why it’s a big shopping day is that even though the stores have been filled with Christmas stuff for weeks, the psychological start to the Christmas season is the day after Thanksgiving. Plus most people get both Thursday off for Thanksgiving, and Friday…and Saturday, and Sunday (unless you are a retail wage-slave ) so there is a whole weekend that can get spent (literally) with shopping together as a family, putting up the outdoor decorations if the weather isn’t bad and getting out of spending one-on-one time with the relatives who travelled to visit you.

14

I give this rant a 9. I don’t fucking get this Black Friday shit at all.

Why not spend the day relaxing with family and friends instead of getting into fights and behaving like a boorish ass? To each their own, I guess. And a lot of people are able to shop, etc. without being idiots. It’s that minority of jackasses that ruin it for everybody.

15

Do you ever not jump in a thread to just piss and moan about others? You seemed to be a vile and nasty person who gets off on snarking on others with the remoteness of the Internet.
Just a nasty, small hearted Jerk!

What is your problem?

Along with a well made rant, myskepticsight actually managed to give us some insight into Black Friday retail that was interesting.

Please go climb back under your bridge.
myskepticsight: Good rant, I give it a 9. I too did my part and stay out of the stores. It was much better to walk to the park with my son and dog.

Just remember Christmas Eve is supposed to be worse.

Jim

16

Just out of curiosity, have you ever contributed to a thread in a way that doesn’t mark you as a withered, bitter cunt?

17

Damn! What Exit? beat me to it.

But i used worse profanity.

18

I am just glad I am not the only one that noticed. Is Carol a she or just a gender neutral resident of a Chicago Suburb?

19

There was a very interesting piece on NPR about this yesterday afternoon. The guest (whose name I cannot recall) said that the competative aspects of that day is what appeals to some. They get satisfaction out of the idea of how much effort and sacrifice they put into getting This Year’s Hot Item for their loved ones-- that the gift means more because of the hell they went through to get it.

Personally, I would add to this the idea that some people use the day as an excuse to vent the frustrations they feel on others. They have this one day when they can act like an asshole and excuse it in their own minds becase “everyone else is doing it.” It’s part of the “tradition.”

20

I think I heard that the Saturday before Christmas is generally the busiest shopping day, even worse than Black Friday.