Black Friday off to a Great Start!

[Trekker4747]

My parents apparently inadvertently participated in Black Friday; they stopped at Whole Foods for groceries, and brought home salad bar/hot food bar boxes, which were apparently 25% for Black Friday.

Grocery stores are not part of the "Black Friday" craze. Grocery stores are usually pretty quiet and dead on Black Friday because everyone is at the mall and has a fridge full of left-overs from the previous day. Usually, though, the store will try and to create some-kind-of surge in sales by offering special deals or trying to get rid of stuff they might be long on.

I can tell you the sales in my department on Friday, Saturday and Sunday are all 30 to 50% lower than they are on normal Fridays and Saturdays. Sundays usually pick-up a little bit but is still slower from the norm.

 

[Robert Maxwell]

Here's the follow-up on Black Friday craziness. Apparently the woman with the pepper spray turned herself in, but is not being identified.

As for the rest, just your avergae shooting, stabbing, and police beating up old men who try to stop their grandchildren from being trampled to death over a video game.

http://news.yahoo.com/alleged-la-area-pepper-spraying-shopper-surrenders-164732499.html

Happy Birthday, Jesus!

From the article:

The store had brought out a crate of discounted Xbox video game players...

Was this written by someone born in 1940?

 

[Cicero]

Grocery stores are not part of the "Black Friday" craze. Grocery stores are usually pretty quiet and dead on Black Friday because everyone is at the mall and has a fridge full of left-overs from the previous day. Usually, though, the store will try and to create some-kind-of surge in sales by offering special deals or trying to get rid of stuff they might be long on.

The weird part in this case was that Whole Foods had big signs on the hot food bar/salad bar advertising a Black Friday-only sale, but nothing else in the store so much as mentioned it. They might as well have just marked it as "25% off! Today only!"

From the article:

The store had brought out a crate of discounted Xbox video game players...

Was this written by someone born in 1940?

Maybe it was written to be readable by someone born in 2040?

 

[Trekker4747]

Talking with a co-worker today. He was on his way home from his future in-laws' house Thursday night and he stopped at a Walmart on the way home (around 10 PM) to get some laundry detergent and some other minor toiletries.

Inside the Walmart he found aisles roped off being "guarded" by security and shrink-wrapped pallets with the "doorbuster" items. Around these pallets people were standing there touching or leaning on the box they had "claimed" for when the pallet was broken open when the sale began.

The laundry soap he needed was down one of the aisles that had been roped off and was being guarded by a security officer. The officer stopped my co-worker as he approached the aisle and said that he couldn't go down there and he would get what he needed for him.

"I just need laundry soap."
"Sorry, I can't let you down here. I can get it for you."

My co-worker simply left the store without having bought anything. His fiancée -a legal immigrant from Iran and currently working in the CIA- had never really experienced this sort of "Black Friday" thing before in the few years now she's lived in America and was amazed at the large crowd of people lining up to get these bargains, the closed off aisles and such and decided it was what she would focus on for an essay she has to do for a college class she's taking.

Him telling this story to me really made me think and just marvel at this. His fiancée is very nice woman and her and her parents are about as Americanized as you can get, they're Persian and practice some Middle-Eastern religion that I can't quite remember the name of, it's not Islam. I know that much.

She spent part of her childhood growing up in Iran and was the subject as some abuse from teachers and staff in school given her mixed background (her mother is part Hispanic.)

I thought of people in Iran still fighting for freedom, of people in Soviet Russia standing in line for bread, people living on the streets all over America standing in line on cold sidewalks for a cup of hot soup and a turkey sandwich.

And here we have people in a suburban Walmart standing in line, waiting, and claiming a $20 Blu-Ray player or whatever their pallet buys were.

There's something fucked-up about that.

 

[Locutus of Bored]

The laundry soap he needed was down one of the aisles that had been roped off and was being guarded by a security officer. The officer stopped my co-worker as he approached the aisle and said that he couldn't go down there and he would get what he needed for him.

"I just need laundry soap."
"Sorry, I can't let you down here. I can get it for you."

My co-worker simply left the store without having bought anything.

And here we have people in a suburban Walmart standing in line, waiting, and claiming a $20 Blu-Ray player or whatever their pallet buys were.

There's something fucked-up about that.

AMAZING TALES OF PEOPLE BEHAVING REASONABLY!!!

Coming this Fall to the Fox Network.


What's the story here? That a security guard politely offered to retrieve your friend's item from the roped off area for him and that people were calmly standing in line for a good deal? The horror of it all.

You're probably living in better conditions than ~80% of the people in the world, so do you constantly question how "fucked up" life is every time you buy something on sale, wait in line at the store, or use a coupon?

It's good to think about the plight of others around the world and how you can help them, but turning that into a negative impression of the people around you for simply wanting to save some money (considering it's Walmart, they're most likely lower middle class and poor people who might not have been able to afford a Blu-Ray player before) doesn't help.

 

[Trekker4747]

More that the store was inconveniencing regular customers by roping off aisles where there were no "Black Friday" deals going on. A private business has every right to do these sort of things, of course. But it's probably not good business practice to make a regular customers have to practically jump through hoops in order to get simple laundry detergent.

This Walmart is in a middle to upper-middle class area so I doubt the people there were poor, though it is possible they could be from some of the more out-lying areas without Walmarts where class structure might dip down to lower-middle and upper-lower classes.

It's just more to see people so adamant and lining up to get whatever trivial thing it was that was on sale. It puts things into perspective to compare what people in other countries line-up for (real things that matter) or even what people in this country line up for (food, shelter, jobs, a bed) and then to see these people lining up for and staking "claim" to some cheaply-priced consumer electronic.

It just amazing to me that people here are so... petty. There was a news story in last Wednesday night about man camped out on the side-walk of a Best Buy with the intentions of sleeping there until the store opened early Friday morning/late Thursday night to ensure he was first in line for whatever deals Best Buy was running.

It's just incredible to me that people do such things given all of the problems that there are there in even just metropolitan area. To speak nothing of the state, the country as a whole or elsewhere in the world.

It really boggles my mind as I can't comprehend the mind-set behind it. It's like trying to divide by zero. I can't do it.

And I'm hardly a person of great wealths myself and I like a good deal as much as the next guy but if I miss out on a deal I shrug it off and move on. I'm not one who is going to ensure he gets to a Best Buy at midnight to make sure I'm the first to get a cheap Blu-Ray player that'll probably be broken in a year.

I find it amusing, shocking and little bit sad.

If someone is so poor, so destitute that they have to do these things for meaningless consumer goods then maybe they shouldn't be spending $25 on a Blu-Ray player and, instead, they should be spending it on food, to pay a utility bill, to pay rent, to save towards a better car, whatever.

And this sort of stuff I know has been going on for a long time (see above re: the video of mobs over Cabbage-Patch dolls) and it still just amazes me.

 

[Cicero]

Him telling this story to me really made me think and just marvel at this. His fiancée is very nice woman and her and her parents are about as Americanized as you can get, they're Persian and practice some Middle-Eastern religion that I can't quite remember the name of, it's not Islam. I know that much.

Zoroastrianism?

If someone is so poor, so destitute that they have to do these things for meaningless consumer goods then maybe they shouldn't be spending $25 on a Blu-Ray player and, instead, they should be spending it on food, to pay a utility bill, to pay rent, to save towards a better car, whatever.

I generally agree with what you've written, but disagree somewhat here. Entertainment items, cheap deals, and the like, can make a great deal of difference in quality of life, especially for poor kids who grow up without a lot of the expensive items that many Americans take for granted.

My family, for instance, saw a lot of movies while my parents were trying to work their way out of poverty (oddly enough, they were only in poverty because my little brother's medical bills wiped out their savings from their time in the Army and forced my father out of graduate school).

My parents were very careful with their money, but little things like going to the movies, getting a book every few months, eventually buying a VCR on sale (a good one, so that they wouldn't have to buy one again), made a big difference. We never knew we were poor until our parents talked about it years later, when we were much more financially successful, even though my parents had sometimes skipped their meals so that we wouldn't notice our poverty.

You never know what difference a Blu-Ray player might make to a parent trying to sustain an illusion of normalcy for their children while working to make the illusion real.

 

[Trekker4747]

Him telling this story to me really made me think and just marvel at this. His fiancée is very nice woman and her and her parents are about as Americanized as you can get, they're Persian and practice some Middle-Eastern religion that I can't quite remember the name of, it's not Islam. I know that much.

Zoroastrianism?

That doesn't sound right, but I've honestly no idea. I just know it's not Islam and they don't use the Qur'an.