"I Survived Black Friday 2005"

Everyone who worked retail today, come in and get your t-shirt!

(Yes, I know there’s a thread for people who worked today, but I’m just looking for retail.)

Actually, I’ve had far worse days than this. First of all, the customers were mostly pleasant, with one exception*. Second of all, we got free coffee and doughnuts. Third of all, I actually prefer a line of customers to the phenomenon of customers drifting up to cashwrap one at a time**. That said, I wonder who’s going to do recovery. I sure didn’t get a chance, and the floor was pretty much in disarray when I left. I hope to be able to restore it at some point, because I really don’t like this place looking like Wal-Mart.

Two interesting occurences. First, a lost child. He was finally reunited with his mother. He was very upset, crying and chewing his fingers, and the :wally just went ahead and got her stuff rung up, even telling him, “Be quiet”. :dubious:

Second, about an hour into my shift, I heard yelling from the floor above (cashwrap is near the escalators) and then security radios crackling. Later found out two women had wanted the same pair of shoes, and it went from arguing to yelling to pushing before security broke it up.

Some people, man.

Anyway, I made good sales, though I’m not getting too excited about that; I predict buyers’ remorse later on. I’m working the whole weekend; we all are. Tuesday, I think I’ll go to Red Robin to reward myself.

So how was it for y’all?

*A phone customer. Real Whiny McWhinerson. I won’t go into details, except to say that it aggravates me that a) we’re supposed to give in just to shut them up, which is not fair to the other customers who say, “Oh, okay,” and accept the fact that there’s no free lunch, and b) doing this over the phone made it look, to the physically-present customers, like I was ignoring them.

**That’s almost always a matter of the next customer materializing right when I’m handing over the receipt for the current one, which I had thought would be the last for a while, freeing me up to go out and do recovery. Sometimes I think they actually hang back on purpose for some psychological reason. Like, standing and waiting behind one person would be pushy or something. But people also have a tendency to join lines, even if they don’t know what the line is for, as part of the herd instinct. So group up, I don’t care; better than rolling up on me out of nowhere.

I had to go to Wal*Monster to get a CO detector tonight. The staff looked stuned. The store itself looked like a coldwar Moscow supermarket. :eek:

I had to go to the local mall for a pair of boots that were finally on sale. I was not looking forward to this trip, because the mall is not my favorite place at any time, let alone Black Friday, but I really wanted those boots. I’m glad I went, cause I got the last pair in my size. :slight_smile:

I overheard some customers being insanely rude to salespeople - why in the world would anyone act like that toward another human being?

I heard lots and lots and lots of screaming, crying children. Why take them when you know they are going to get tired? When you know they are going to want stuff? Do you enjoy yelling at them in public, embarrassing everyone around you because you are too stupid to be embarrassed at yourself?

There was a man sitting in the shoe department of the store I was shopping in. A little boy, maybe 6 or 7, was curled up on the chair beside him, asleep. The man just kept looking at the door from the store into the mall. My saleslady told me he had been sitting there for three hours waiting on his wife to come back. She wouldn’t answer her cellphone. If I had the keys, I would have left the bitch. If she had the keys, I would have taken a cab. And I’d be getting a divorce for Christmas.

To all of you who work in retail sales - thank you. I’m sorry you have to put up with so much crap.

I must say I enjoyed today. i make a point never to shop on this day. I’ve got all my shopping done by September. Then I go to malls in December and sit and watch, peacefully.

I went to both Linens-n-Things and Target, in search of a new fake Christmas tree. The staff at both stores were very pleasant (and very busy!), but I could have hugged one of the guys at Target: there were no more boxes of the tree that I wanted on the floor, so he agreed to go look in the back … and found one! :slight_smile: He was gone for so long that my friend and I started to think he’d gotten lost or pulled onto another task or something, when suddenly there he was, with the box on a cart and everything. We both shook his hand, and thanked him profusely.

This was my first time inside a store (let alone two of them, which were both inside a mall :eek: ) on Black Friday since my days of working retail in college, and it wasn’t nearly as bad as I know it could have been.

This was my first Black Friday in four years that I didn’t work retail. I stayed home and slept while my mother got up and shopped. I stayed home partly out of comfort/laziness, partly ‘cause I didn’t want to add to the retail workers’ load.

i got to start my new book store job yest.

because it was a bookstore it was not horrible. got to help customers find things and ring a bit at the register. i may be getting my old rhythym back.

the toy store and pay/half was insane! and people stampeded in walmart in mich. unbelievable!!

I have to ask - WHY do you guys call the day after your Thanksgiving “Black Friday”? I actually only started hearing it this year, but I’m not that observant of things south of the border, so I probably just never noticed previously.

The day after Thanksgiving is the biggest or second biggest shopping day of the year - putting all the stores in the black (financially successful).

This was my first one working – I never shop then! – and I am at that bastion of evil, Walmart. And no, it didn’t look like a tornado hit us when I left, but that’s because we were doing our damndest to keep up.

I work in clothes, so while it was busy, I didn’t have to come in until 10, and missed the worst of it. I’m wondering if I should shower my AM with gratitude for that.

My SIL did it proud. Not working, but shopping. She left after Thanksgiving dinner, picked up a friend, and they hit the front doors of the Camarillo outlet mall near LA just before midnight. It was crowded, but they got started. Around 3:00 AM, the amatuers got tired and left, and Jennifer & Sharon could really rev it up! I think they left about 8:30 AM!

Rock on, ladies!

Disclaimer- Jenn does this once a year, on Black Friday. The rest of the 364 days, she wouldn’t wake up before 10:00 AM if you paid her! :wink:

I know what you meant, but this made me laugh. :slight_smile:

I could say softlines, but nobody but retail people would know what I meant. I’m sort of a floater among the various clothes areas, though I spend most of my time in lingerie and infants. Yes, odd combination, but there’s lots of little things to do in those areas ALL THE DAMN TIME.

You’d think they could give me today off after working Thursday and Friday. Oh well.

I sorta work in retail. That is, I work for a retail company, but for the dotcom part of the business, so not doing direct customer contact.

It was a crazy crazy day. We hit our traffic expectations for Black Friday on Tuesday, and kept climbing. Business was up something like 50% over last year, and our site was having troubling handling all the traffic.

So do I count, or not?

Kevin Drum dives into Nexis and answers your question, sort of:

Once the term started to get into circulation, people were free to use it in whatever sense they intended. I’d say there’s a people using it in each sense mentioned above, plus potential shoppers now calling the day Black Friday because they’re saying, “Note to self: don’t go anywhere near a mall on this day.”

I expect the ‘putting the retailers into the black’ usage is now one of the lesser uses of the term, because people see things from their own POV, not from that of some group (people who own or manage large retail businesses) who are mostly foreign to them. Most of us shop, and either lace up our track shoes early that morning, or stay the hell away from the stores, and a fair number of people work or once worked in retail stores. But very few of us, proportionately, are in a position to be aware of the bottom line at the sorts of businesses that have big day-after-Thanksgiving sales each year.

Cool! Thanks. Thanksgiving Day north of the border is too early for that sort of panic (same day as your Columbus day), so our panic just sort of ramps up smoothly until Christmas Eve.

Then, of course, there’s the Boxing Day sales. Since Christmas tends to be a pretty slow news day, you can generally count on seeing at least one story about the nutters who start lining up outside stores mid-afternoon Christmas Day. I suspect that Boxing Day is the closest Canada gets to Black Friday.

I worked Black Friday, but it was a 6p-11p shift. :slight_smile: