Black Friday

The Black Friday holiday peaked around 2008, when the Great Recession forced people to go to stores at 2:00 a.m. the day after Thanksgiving just so they could get a DVD of The Devil Wears Prada for two dollars and fight a single mom over a Dyson vacuum that was thirty dollars off. I once saw a sixtysomething Ohio man punch a younger gentleman for a Ryobi drill at Walmart. He coldcocked his honky ass to save thirteen dollars. It was the best of times, and more than that, it was the worst of times.

Society hasn’t fully processed those years in the early aughts when Black Friday kept heightening in absurdity. Year after year, we would turn on the news to find women pummeled to death in the name of an MP3 player doorbuster deal. I wish I could act as though I were above it, but I was right there among the frugal people, running into a Target while it was still dark out, smile on my face. In fact, to be fully transparent, here I am in a local Cleveland paper, seen hauling ass for a nine-dollar copy of Mario Kart on Wii…

(That’s me in the hat and scarf, perfect running form as I headed inside.)

That day, I saw things no human should ever see, a dark side of retail and consumerism that we must never revisit. It is pertinent that we learn from our mistakes, and I tell this tale not to make you laugh, no, but to caution you to never repeat the evils of the past—specifically Black Friday pre-2010.

It was 2007, and no less than twenty-four hours earlier, I was waking up at my parents’ house to watch Nikki Blonsky perform “You Can’t Stop the Beat” from Hairspray atop an Amica insurance float at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. I was living on my own for the first time, nary a disposable fund in my bank account. I had maybe sixty dollars to my name, and I needed to buy gifts for parents, siblings, and significant others of siblings, and I had a brand-new home to furnish. Times were tough, so I convinced my older brother and Mom to join me for an early morning shopping trip at the nearby Ohio outlet center.

We would hit up Target at 5:00, right when they opened, then head off to the Walmart next door, followed by a stop at Kohl’s, which opened an hour later. Mom had her wad of Kohl’s cash at the ready like she always does, never not prepared to get a discount on whatever pajamas and word art she decides to buy. After Kohl’s, we would head back home for some fuel (leftover stuffing and mashed potatoes covered in day-old gravy) before heading back out to the actual mall, where we would do the specialty shops.

If we wanted to get any deals at Target, we would have to get there early and wait in line. Fortunately, employees were handing out coffee and candy canes before opening the doors, so we had sustenance while we waited alongside other customers. Just a few yards ahead of us in line were people who’d brought sleeping bags and spent the night. When asked what they’d camped out for, they said “a GPS system.” We’re so lucky that nowadays our phones tell us where to drive, because back then, we had to buy entirely different gadgets in place of paper maps, and if you were strapped for cash, you would have to literally sleep at the store to get one at a reasonable price.

Behind us in line, I met a woman named Thisa, a name I remembered because she corrected me when I thought her name was Lisa. “No, it’s Thisa, like class thesis, but Thisa.” Everyone was tired and making little sense, but somehow, I understood exactly what she meant.

Once inside, I ran to the back of the store by the electronics. Mom went to housewares, and my older brother went to tools. Everyone was in a mad scramble to get their discounted wares, including my old friend Thisa, who was in the market for a PlayStation 3. They were an incredibly hot item that year, almost impossible to get. Most places didn’t even have a discount on them, but stores were advertising to get people through the doors in hopes they would buy other things while on the hunt. I’m guessing each location got about five consoles, three of which were accounted for by seasonal employees. In the rush to get one of the remaining two, Thisa tossed aside a young girl who got in her way. When I say tossed aside, I mean Thisa threw her like a rag doll. This child must’ve been about seven years old, and Thisa put her right foot in front of the kid and then used her hand to push her out of the way. I’d never seen anything like it. Under ordinary circumstances, a crowd would’ve reprimanded this adult for being so physical with a child, but no one has any sense at 5:00 a.m. when they’re shopping for a deal and loaded with last night’s tryptophan.

Back in electronics, there was a table setup with video game systems. A big sign said SONY and had a wall of PlayStation 2s surrounding a small quantity of the new PlayStation 3s. The employees were obviously trying to trick consumers, who likely assumed the newer system would be either on a table by itself or behind a glass.

I, of course, was just looking to get my copy of Mario Kart, which wasn’t as tough to grab. I got my game and held it tight, then started looking at the other discounts. If you’ve ever done Black Friday, you know it’s called Black Friday because you simply black out when shopping. The Krampus spirit takes over, and you lose all sense of normalcy, grabbing whatever is in your path. I only budgeted for one Wii game, yet I was grabbing other items that it seemed like the other shoppers wanted. There was an area with one lone waffle maker left, so I grabbed it. Other people were fighting over boxes of Monopoly for a dollar, so I grabbed one of those too. It didn’t matter that I already had Monopoly and hadn’t played it for over ten years or that I don’t make waffles; I was buying these items. Why? Because I grabbed them before other people who also wanted them. Somewhere in the haze, I noticed Thisa out of the corner of my eye.

“Give me the fucking PlayStation!” she shouted at a little old lady.

“It’s my fucking PlayStation!” the little old lady shouted back, f-bombs aplenty, as a crowd gathered around the two women as if it were a UFC fight.

While the two sparring partners were playing tug-of-war with the box, the young girl Thisa had tossed aside earlier was circling the grown women. I noticed her getting closer and closer to Thisa.

“Thisa, be careful. There’s a child!” I said, warning my violent line friend about the kid she’d already gone one round with and won.

Thisa ignored me, glaring directly into the eyes of the octogenarian on a quest for a new machine to play Crash Bandicoot on.

The little girl crept closer and closer as Thisa dug her heels into the store tile. Before I could warn Thisa again, she backed her ass (literally) up into the child.

This time, the young girl flew across the aisle, screaming. Only it wasn’t a normal scream; it was what I can only describe as a Disney Channel scream. If you’ve ever turned on the Disney Channel only to see a young actor aggressively performing mannerisms and facial tics completely detached from reality, then you know this scream. And that’s exactly what this girl did. Like a caffeinated Hannah Montana. And Thisa stopped in her tracks to join in!

“You see what you made me do? That little girl is hurt!” she shouted at the old woman, still clutching the PlayStation 3.

“That’s not my fault!” the elderly woman responded.

“Hey! Stop this right now!” an employee shouted, finally getting everyone to settle down as he helped the little girl up. “This is out of hand!”

I noticed the child had a cry face but no tears. Like a Real Housewife on a reunion couch talking to Andy Cohen, she was simply looking for sympathy.

“You okay?” the employee asked her.

“I was just trying to get the PlayStation for my older brother and these two ladies knocked me out.”

“Give her the video game!” a woman nearby shouted, encouraging other consumers to join in her chant.

The scene was something out of a movie, with strangers banding together to chastise the two adults fighting over a gaming console until both their hearts grew two sizes and they handed it over to the little kid. The child skipped away with her PlayStation 3 in hand. With the attention span of a dog, the crowd immediately dispersed and went about the rest of their discounting to fight with each other over other goods. A man ripped a Shrek the Third plush out of the hands of another adult man. Two twentysomething women fought over a one-dollar bath bomb. Chaos. It’s hard to describe war to people who haven’t found themselves in the middle of the fight, but trust and believe that there were casualties that morning, all before sunrise.

After paying for my Wii game, the waffle maker and Monopoly board, a copy of the second Twilight book (which I still haven’t read), and strawberry-chocolate lip gloss in a container that looked like a purse, which I told everyone was for my cousin Natalie but was really for myself, I met my brother and Mom to check out their hauls. They had tools for my dad, a sweater for my brother, and various holiday decorations for my parents’ house—the standard fare, which we loaded into the trunk of my mom’s SUV. Mom used a cart, which she asked me to return to the cart rack, so like any other asshole, I simply wheeled the cart to the nearest place where no one would see me abandon it. That place was an empty parking spot, which happened to be next to a brand-new Lexus. Inside, it was loaded with finds from Black Friday shopping.

Just as I was walking away from our discarded cart, I heard the beeping of the doors unlocking and a familiar voice…

“Throw these bags in the back really quick—”

It was Thisa! I was ready to offer my condolences for her not getting the PlayStation 3 she had been fighting for earlier. But before I could get out the words, I saw the young girl she’d tossed like a football, now holding the PlayStation 3.

“Thanks, Mom. Go ahead to Kohl’s, and I’ll be right behind you.”

“Sara! What did I tell you?” Thisa scolded.

“Oh, right, sorry. I won’t call you Mom again,” Sara replied.

Thisa and Sara were holiday scammers! Have you ever seen the movie Heartbreakers with Sigourney Weaver and Jennifer Love Hewitt? They were like that, only instead of using cleavage to con men, they were weaponizing holiday cheer to scam Sony PlayStations from a Midwest shopping center.

What I couldn’t figure out was why Thisa had pushed her daughter upon entering the store. My theory is that they intended to fight each other over the PlayStation, hoping the crowd would remember how mean the adult was to the child and encourage her to turn it over, thereby ensuring no one else got the machine. Instead, a third party was involved. I pose this question to you—was the initial store push part of their cahoots?

I didn’t tell anyone that day what I witnessed, worried we had all already seen so much darkness, what with soccer moms shoving people out of the way for eight-dollar three-wicks. I can’t even remember the last time someone was trampled to death for a DVD player. Those of us on the front lines during those 2000s and 2010s Black Fridays will never forget some images we saw in the wee hours of the morning. We will be forever haunted by the screams and violence we clocked some of our contemporaries displaying on a quest for doorbusters. Only now can we begin to heal, looking back at the faults of yesteryear to ensure we don’t repeat the mistakes of yore. Black Friday is now known as a relatively calm shopping day, but real ones know that those two words stand for all the fallen soldiers who never made it to see how far we’ve come. May we always remember those items we lost and the lives we compromised in the name of discounted Panasonic TVs that came with a free ten-dollar gift card for your next purchase before the following Tuesday.