The shop clerk lifted her chin when asked if she would be working Black Friday sales late on Thanksgiving Day or in the early morning hours that followed.
“No,” she sniffed. “We don’t do Black Friday like that,” going on to explain that while retailers like Macy’s and Toys “R” Us or low-end discount stores trawled for marked-down shoppers as the Christmas buying season began, her upscale establishment would not. I did not mean to offend.
On safer ground at Macy’s, I posed the same question at the cosmetics counter. The clerk there rolled her eyes, showing a flash of irritation at the thought, but quickly recovered her courteous-employee attitude, fixed a smile on her face and responded, “Yes! Please come in. I’ll be here.”
Black Friday. The term has an ominous tinge to it, the color suggesting Stygian darkness, bleakness, sorrow and woe, evil and villainy.
Though early references tied it to an 1869 financial crisis when speculators attempted to corner the gold market, Black Friday later evolved to apply to a day of massive traffic jams as people flooded city streets intent on holiday shopping.
But retailers weren’t keen on the unfavorable image for their biggest day of sales and began to revise the concept to reflect the black ink, or positive gains on their ledgers, as buying pushed their businesses to profitability.
In recent years, Black Friday has intruded on Thanksgiving Day to the point that eager shoppers abandon the pumpkin pie to pitch tents outside Walmarts and Best Buys to make sure they get first crack at cheap flat-screen TVs and hot-hot-hot toys or gaming consoles.
At the other end, virtual stores horned in, tagging on Cyber Monday to the weekend of buying mania.
Instead of jockeying for mall parking, shoppers sit at work stations sneaking purchases on their office computers, taking advantage of limited-time flash sales, other discounts and free shipping promotions and pushing online spending to $1.3 billion this year, a one-day record, and eclipsing Black Friday sales by nearly 30 percent.
Cyber Monday shopping has boomed so much that the Justice Department keeps watch on websites that offer counterfeit products and others that steal customer information in identity theft schemes.
Sheesh.
While retail sales keep businesses and the economy going, how did we get to the point when the desire for bargain-priced goods has people pepper spraying each other, as did a woman at a Walmart in Los Angeles. And even though Christmas sales keep people employed — at least for the season — pulling family members away from the Thanksgiving table to work a cash register, as happened at Target stores, seems out of character on a purely American holiday.
As for Christmas, the Christian observance has become a sidelight to the season of buying as Black Friday has become the very good Friday for retailers as well as the consumer in all of us.
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Cynthia Oi can be reached at coi@staradvertiser.com.
