I was starting to feel like I was getting the hang of things at work. Cindy wasn’t as frustrated with me as she used to be, and I had gotten to know my colleagues better. Also, I seemed to have developed a mental map of the store in my head; I realized I was able to locate a particular product placed anywhere in the store almost immediately. This was something I hadn’t tried to learn—it had just come to me over time, the result of being there for eight hours a day, five days a week.
I was impressed with myself for having developed such a good sense of what was where at work, since I still couldn’t find things at home. I would often lose my belt, my sock, or my underwear, and end up emptying the entire wardrobe in an attempt to find it. But I also didn’t make half as much of an effort to put things where they were supposed to go as I did at work. I figured the danger of my wife divorcing me was much lower than that of Cindy firing me. My efficiency at work was a good manifestation of an old proverb in India. Literally translated from Hindi to English, it would mean something like: fear makes love happen.
My sales figures were slowly making it to a respectable level. I had learned a lot by watching others—Cindy’s skill at convincing the customer by giving a live demonstration; Jackie’s cheerful, loving, and friendly chatter; and Ron’s ability to make customers believe how much knowledge and experience he had. I was learning something from everyone. It seemed to be the best—the only—way to learn.
For the past week or so Cindy had been talking about the golden quarter a lot. “You gotta be ready for the golden quarter.” “You know what happens when we approach the golden quarter.” “Things get really busy in the golden quarter.”
One morning when she was returning from her daily visit to the coffee shop in the mall, she turned to me, put on a cheeky smile, and said, “Deepak, I’m surprised you haven’t asked me what the golden quarter is all about yet.”
Acknowledging that she was teasing me, I smiled and said, “Well, I was going to, but I thought I should wait until you put that coffee cup away.” She laughed loudly.
She said, “Very good, Deepak, very good.” Later in the day she called for a meeting. Everyone gathered around the counter.
“I hope you guys are aware that the holiday season is around the corner—a time when most Americans go into debt buying gifts for their friends and family,” she said. “I don’t have to tell you how most businesses look forward to this time—the golden quarter. They plan ahead, since this is the opportunity when you don’t have to try too hard to sell; people readily spend everything they have.” She put on a big grin. “I want to make sure my staff understands the seriousness of this big occasion because you know what it means for you.”
As we looked on, she said, rubbing her index finger on her thumb vigorously, “Yes, money, money, money, that’s what’s it’s all about. Everyone makes huge commissions.” She said there were going to be a lot of changes in how things worked at the store. A new line of products would be introduced to cater to demand in the market. The sales floor would have to make room to accommodate shipments.
She said the head office had given her permission to hire three more people for the golden quarter. Cindy mentioned that the three new people would be seasonal employees. They would only be hired for the holiday season—October to December—but if they performed well, they could be considered for longer-term employment. She said we would have to help train them. She conducted the interviews and after going through a few people she hired a twenty-year-old African American man, Cameron; a nineteen-year-old white girl, Paula; and a forty-year-old white man, Tom.
Cameron’s last boss had given him a negative reference, but Cindy liked him and said she wanted to give him a chance. Paula was very short—well below five feet—and had a round face and blond hair. She had done a variety of sales jobs before, but had been a waitress most recently. She acted as if she knew the job and the place as well as if she had been working with us for a long time. Tom was not Cindy’s choice. She had received orders from the district office to hire him. Apparently he had been working for our company as a manager, but was demoted and sent to our store. All three started within a few days.
I wondered if the sales would go high enough to keep six people busy on the sales floor. Oftentimes it was hard keeping two of us occupied; time and again we found ourselves rearranging the items, changing the price tags, or standing around chatting when there was nothing else to do. Worried about all of the employees making enough sales to earn decent commissions, I asked Cindy, “Do you think it will be busy enough to keep all of us occupied?” She laughed, and said, “You watch, Deepak. On Black Friday, I find it hard to even go take a pee—it’s that busy.”
“Black Friday—what’s that?” I asked.
“You don’t know what Black Friday is, Deepak?” Jackie asked, looking at me with raised eyebrows.
Cindy laughed again, and said, “He’s from India, don’t you know?”
I stood there, shifting my gaze between Cindy and Jackie, trying to figure out what I had been missing, and what the joke was.
“Oh, Deepak,” Cindy said, trying to recover from her laughing spasm. “Awright, Black Friday is the day after Thanksgiving. It is the biggest day of the year for retail businesses. There are huge discounts on lots of things, and it is the start of the holiday season in America. Most people start their Christmas shopping on Black Friday, and keep going til Christmas.”
She took a swig from the coffee cup sitting next to her. “And all the stores open at five . . . and some even earlier.”
“You mean five o’clock in the morning?”
“Yes, Deepak, that early,” she said. “And everyone needs to be at work at four because people line up outside the door much before we open.” I couldn’t imagine people coming to shop at five in the morning. The way Cindy was talking she seemed to be preparing to deal with not just a handful of customers, but a mob.
“In order to be ready for that day, I have a list of things to tell you,” she said. Everyone looked at her. She smiled, with a sparkle in her eyes. “I’ve got a strategy, and everybody let me know if you agree with this, or you wanna do it differently, awright?” she said. “Since it’s going to be crazy busy, no one’s gonna get a chance to talk to any of the customers. You’ll just be clerking, ringing people up—that’s all.” It was very rare that customers came in to buy something and one of us didn’t have to answer a question, or help them find exactly what they needed. It was unimaginable that people would just grab stuff off the shelf and bring it to the cash register. I was having a hard time believing everything Cindy was saying about Black Friday.
“So, my suggestion is that we divide up the sales that day among the six sales associates. There are three cash registers, and everyone can take turns ringing people up, because I am tellin’ you, you gonna get tired of standing in one place constantly for hours.” This surprised me. I thought everything was based on performance in America—you work hard, you move up—and not about sharing your wealth with someone who didn’t try as hard as you did.
Most Americans get up in arms about socialism—distributing your income among others—but it appeared that Cindy had something else in mind. I had been trying to do well, and wanted to be competitive. I looked at Ron and Jackie to see what they thought of this idea. Apparently, this was their first time working on a Black Friday too, but they seemed to understand Cindy’s ideas more than I did. They didn’t protest. The newly hired employees didn’t mind either, but I was a little apprehensive.
I asked, “So, Cindy, will it be fair to divide the sales even when some people tried harder than others?”
“That’s why I am leaving this to you guys to decide. I’ve seen this before and I know what it’s like. It’s better to team up and help the store make more money, and in the process everyone else makes money too,” she explained. Although I wasn’t too excited about sharing my sales with everyone else, especially on a day when I could sell a lot, I agreed with Cindy. No one else said yes or no—it was assumed that Cindy’s plan was approved.
“Now, since it’s going to be a very busy day, and you will need a lot of stamina running back and forth fetching products from the backroom, standing long hours on your feet, I am cooking a lot of food for you guys,” said Cindy. “Expect to see a table full of goodies when you arrive in the morning.” I didn’t know how to react to everything. It felt exciting, challenging, adventurous, and unbelievable. And it didn’t seem as if Cindy was done with the meeting, since she was still sitting on the countertop, going through her notes.
“And, yes, I wanted to tell you about the people. You’ll have to be very patient, very patient. You will encounter some real nasty customers that day.” Ron and Jackie looked at me and nodded, as if they knew exactly what she meant, while I looked at her inquisitively. I didn’t understand what she meant by people being nasty at five in the morning.
“Yes, a lot of people who come to shop that day are generally in a bad mood. They are hung over from excessive drinking the night before, they’ve eaten too much, and some of them can be really rude—” she left the sentence half-finished to be amplified by our imaginations. She told us that we would need to work for at least twelve hours that day—4 A.M. to 4 P.M.—and some of us would have to stay until nine o’clock.
The store was closed on the day of Thanksgiving. Most of my colleagues were celebrating with their families who lived in Charlottesville, or drove to nearby towns to visit their relatives. Holly wanted to see her family, who lived in rural Pennsylvania, but this time she had to stay home, since I needed to work the next day—we could not have gotten back in time for me to work at four in the morning. Since she still wanted to celebrate, she decided to prepare the traditional Thanksgiving meal—turkey, mashed potatoes, gravy, cranberry sauce—for the two of us; we ate and talked about Black Friday. I asked her if she had ever gone to shop at five in the morning.
“No, I haven’t, but it looks like I am going to do it tomorrow.” She looked at me and smiled. We went to bed early that night. She was going to drop me off and then take a walk around the mall and check out the sales.
The alarm went off, and I got out of bed. I walked to the window and looked at the apartment parking lot below—it appeared unusually empty. I wondered if the people had already left to line up outside the stores. I took a shower quickly and got ready for the day. Soon we were on the road. I saw that all the stores had their blue, green, and red neon Open signs glowing, lots of people were gathering, and cars were shuffling in and out of the parking lots. Men, women, and children were walking on the sidewalks in herds as if they were performing some holy pilgrimage.
It reminded me of the epic festival of Kumbh Mela in India, when millions of Hindus travel for miles to take one holy dip in the sacred Ganges before sunrise to rid them of their sins. They fast for several days before the festival, and then perform long worshipping rituals after immersing their bodies in the sacred water. It made me think that the Americans were doing the same thing except they had been eating a lot the day before, and were now walking in the dark to immerse their souls in the material world.
We arrived at the mall, and my wife had to circle three times before she could find a spot to park. I had never seen the parking lot so full. There was a hint of deep blue in the sky, stars were twinkling, and it was still dark. The parking area was filled with the muffled sound of car engines running. People were sitting inside their cars, with the heat turned on, trying to stay warm on a chilly November morning; they had an hour to wait before the mall would open. As I walked across the lot, I saw through the fogged-up windows of the cars that some people were dozing—plopped on their seats, which were reclined to an 180 degree angle, their feet up by the windshields.
When I walked through the back door of my store, I saw a long table full of muffins, scones, cookies, cakes, chips, bagels, doughnuts, different kinds of sodas, a brown square cardboard box labeled Coffee, and plastic utensils. Cindy, who was sitting on her chair, had her hair freshly washed, but her eyes were still puffy. It seemed like she had spent the entire night preparing for this day. The lights on the sales floor weren’t turned on yet, and the mall was dark too—only the backroom was lit.
In the next few minutes, the sales staff arrived. Before Cindy said anything about the food or eating, Ron filled his cup with coffee, and said, “I need to wake up.” Cindy, who seemed to have forgotten to ask people to help themselves to food, said, “Oh, yeah, go ahead and grab a bite, y’all—it’s gonna be a long day.”
Everyone stood around with their hands wrapped around coffee cups, staring at the floor, not saying anything, as if they were in a zombie state. After a few minutes, when people had woken up a little more, Cindy said, “Alright guys, no one’s ringing sales in their names—you ring it in my name, and I will split the total in six parts when the day is over.” She gave us her password.
“I think there’s enough food to last for the rest of the day and feel free to have seconds, thirds, fourths, as much as you want. Once the mall is opened, you’re not gonna get a chance to relax,” she said.
“The parking lot is full of people waiting to get in,” Jackie said.
“Yep, I told you,” said Cindy. “Go ahead and turn the lights on, it’ll be time to open soon.” Jackie flicked the switch and we moved onto the sales floor. It felt strange being inside the store with no one else in the mall but hundreds of people waiting outside to get in. It felt like some kind of a battle: Cindy, our commander, was prepared with her soldiers to defend against the enemy waiting to get inside the mall and loot our wealth. I felt a little uneasy about what might happen when the doors opened. I had gotten used to dealing with the customers in ones and twos, and felt nervous about a mob. We had to be nice to them while they were allowed to be rough.
As I was thinking of all this, I heard Cindy say, “Go ahead and open the doors.” There was still no one in the mall. I opened the doors and stepped out to see what it felt like to be in the mall at five in the morning. All the stores were open, festive-sounding music poured from the mall sound system, and in the next minute, I saw a hundred or so people rushing in my direction through the hallway on my left. They moved fast, almost running, holding leaflets, brochures, and what looked like newspaper cuttings.
The last time I had seen a mob like this was when I went to the train station in Lucknow to see off one of my friends. It was in the early hours, maybe four or five o’clock—the sun hadn’t risen. We had arrived early and hung around on platform number 1, drinking tea out of Styrofoam cups, waiting for my friend’s train to New Delhi. We walked around, detouring around people who lay on the floor with their heads resting on bags or other sorts of luggage. About ten minutes later, when the train arrived, we saw about a thousand people pouring in from all directions. Their aim was to get on the train and occupy a seat before someone else claimed it.
In a country of more than a billion it is not surprising to see so many people at any given moment—it happens all the time. It was hard to believe my eyes when I saw hundreds of people heading in my direction at five in the morning in Charlottesville. They wanted to get into the store first and grab the items on sale before the store ran out. I quickly got back inside the store, and announced, “They’re here.”
In the next few seconds, the store was filled with more people than it could possibly hold. Young men, older men, young women, women who were not so young, teenagers, children, toddlers, and babies occupied every inch of the sales floor. I stood behind the counter, and watched them scan the store with their eyes, as if they were on some kind of mission, a treasure hunt. They were not just browsing, but hungrily searching, rummaging through each shelf, looking up, down, behind, and underneath every single section of the store. I tried saying hello to some of them, but they didn’t bother even to look at me. Their eyes were set on something else. They wanted to be done with this store and move on to the next one.
In the process of moving, shoving, looking, and grabbing, they knocked down piles of toys stacked up in several places around the store. Within ten minutes they changed the way the store looked—price tags were torn off, displays knocked down, products that had been hanging on hooks lay on the floor, and the merchandise on the shelves was disorderly. Three of us, including me, were on the cash registers; the other three were lost in the crowd somewhere.
One lady, who seemed to have rolled out of her bed only a minute ago—she had lint stuck in her black curly hair—started bringing stuff to the counter. She had two little boys who were helping her grab things from different parts of the store. When I started to check her out, she said, “Hold on a second, can’t you see I am still shopping?” I apologized, and waited. She kept bringing stuff until half of the counter was covered with her things.
“Awright, I am ready now,” she said.
I began to check her out. I scanned for ten minutes, and I was only half done with her pile.
While I concentrated on keeping separate the items I had scanned from the items I hadn’t, I heard a loud scream. “Listen bitch, you better keep your child’s fuckin’ hands off my boy’s toys.” I was startled to hear someone swear like that, and turned around to see who it was. Another lady with an enormous pile of toys was getting ready to check out next to me. Jackie was helping her bring stuff to the counter while she tried to keep her kid from running around. The other woman had a mean look on her face. Suddenly, the lady with me was standing face to face with her.
“You don’t call me no bitch, you whore,” she screamed back. “It’s too early in the mornin’, and y’know what? It’s my fuckin’ child and I ain’t stoppin’ him from gettin’ anything he lays his hands on today. Am I clear enough, you whore?”
All hell broke loose. The next minute, the two ladies grabbed a Rubicon toy jeep, and engaged in a real tug of war, calling names, swearing, grunting, spitting, and screaming. I saw Cindy stepping aside and getting on the phone to call mall security. I didn’t think that the guards would respond fast enough on a day like this, since there must be fights in other stores too. In the meantime, the two women carried on.
Finally, the lady I was helping gave up, and said, “Fuck this shit. I ain’t spendin’ another minute in this store. Can’t deal with this woman no more.” She stormed out, dragging her kids, while one of them yelled, “Momma, my Rubicon.” The package was torn and the toy broken. I was left with a mountain of merchandise.
I looked at Cindy, who said, “Go ahead and void that ticket out,” and exhaled in exasperation. The quarrel between the two ladies didn’t dampen the shopping spirits of other people in the store. They continued prowling. I voided the ticket, and moved the merchandise that was strewn across the counter. After the fight, I noticed that people were more careful about not mixing their things with others’. They circled their arms around their stuff until someone checked them out and put it in a bag. I had never seen sales receipts the length of my body before. The machine wouldn’t stop spitting paper.
People were on edge, irritable, and not friendly at all. The hour of the day had something to do with it, but it seemed there were other things that were affecting their mood. I recognized some people in the crowd who were regular customers, and who were usually patient and cordial. Even they seemed to be in the same mood as everyone else. It felt like the limited supply of the extra-cheap products, and a small window of time to shop, put everyone under pressure.
“You got that ten dollar digital photo frame in stock?”
“Yes, we do, sir.”
“How many you got?”
“We have fourteen of them.”
“I’ll take all of them.” It felt as if they wanted to buy all of them not because they needed fourteen photo frames, but because they didn’t want thirteen other people to be able to get them.
“Hey, you got that ten dollar digital photo frame in stock? I need four of ‘em.”
“No, ma’am, we just ran out of them.”
“Chrissakes, it’s only six in the morning, and you are already out of them?”
“Someone just bought all of them.”
“Really?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“God, someone’s really desperate.” They would leave feeling frustrated, giving me a look that seemed to say, You liar.
Within an hour of opening, the store sales total reached five thousand dollars—something I hadn’t seen even at the end of a good sales day. People seemed possessed; it didn’t look as if they had the need for any particular product, but were buying because they didn’t want to miss out. We had extra-large bags—big enough to contain a human—that had been shipped to our store for this special day. People walked out, carrying the giant bags on their backs, staggering under the weight of discounted goods.
The hustle and bustle continued for a few hours, and by the time I got the chance to look at my watch, it was ten. The mayhem had abated to some extent. I looked around the store to assess the carnage. It looked like it had been looted—the wall that had been full of remote control cars a few hours ago had nothing on it now; aluminum shelves were bare; steel pegs were empty except for a lonely flashlight or laser key chain. The stacks of battery-operated helicopters that had been piled on the floor were gone, and the sales floor looked like it was covered with the remnants of a bomb explosion.
Black Friday in Charlottesville reminded me of Tuesdays in Lucknow. My mother and her mother used to visit a temple located in the middle of a historic shopping center in Lucknow. On Tuesdays, the temple organizes a worshipping ritual—a call-and-response chant known as kirtan—for Lord Hanuman, the monkey God. Hundreds of devotees, street urchins, beggars, and homeless people surround the temple while the priests sing, accompanied by loud drum beats and the deafening ring of gigantic, yellow-colored steel bells, echoing off every building in the vicinity. As the kirtan approaches its end, people outside the temple jostle to get close to the entrance; they want to get the biggest share of the prasad, the offering distributed in the form of sweets.
Not everyone manages to reach the holy offering, and those who do get it don’t get a lot of it. Children pull on the sleeves of other children to stop them from getting a piece of laddu—a sugary round ball made of chickpea flour—and women balancing a child on their hips elbow out other women carrying a child. Sometimes two or three hands land at the same time on one tiny piece of laddu, pulling it in three different directions, causing it to get crushed and fall to the street in shards. Fights break out, creating a riot-like situation—quite like the ladies screaming at each other over the toy Rubicon in Charlottesville. While the torn pieces of packages, spilled coffee, and doughnut crumbs on the floor transported me to the temple scene in Lucknow, I heard Cindy call everyone for a quick get-together.
Watching people’s enthusiasm about shopping on this day, I wondered what it was that motivated the United States of America to wake up at dawn to shop. If I had drunk and overeaten the night before, I would have loved to sleep in the next day. Waking up at four in the morning would be torture. I would not get in a line with a hundred people to buy something unless it was a bus ticket and I had to evacuate the city because a tornado was on its way.
Watching people walk by with bags crammed with stuff, I tried to understand their psyches. Maybe the corporations had brainwashed their minds into thinking that this was their one lucky day, the only day in the entire year to stock up. Maybe they had been waiting all year to buy that plasma TV or laptop. Maybe it gave people some kind of thrill to see whether they could beat the crowd and be the one who seized the deal of the year. Maybe there were folks who treated this opportunity as some kind of an emotional therapy. I worked at ElectronicsHut and the entire store was available to me before it was to the customers. I could have bought anything and everything I wanted, but I didn’t. I was, however, curious about what other stores had on sale. Maybe this day was about wanting whatever we didn’t have, and not considering whatever we did have. I was thinking.
In the month after Black Friday, the mall was full of people walking around with three or four plastic bags that had different brand names on them. Everyone looked to be in a shopping stupor, as if this were what they had to do, whether they liked it or not. They would walk in and say, “D’you guys have that digital camera pack that comes with a printer, paper, and what not?”
“Yes, we do, sir!”
“Great, let me get three of those.” They would not ask us to explain how it worked, what features it had, nor, most surprisingly, how much it cost. I would just grab it, scan the barcode, and put it in the bag. They would drop a thousand dollars like it was pocket change.
I noticed that women generally shopped during the day. They would spend a lot of time looking for something in different sections of the store, index finger on their chin, as if they were not sure what to get. I approached them and said, “Is there something I can help you with?”
“Yeah, I am trying to decide what to get for my twelve-year-old son. His dad has already bought him an iPod, but I don’t know what I should get for him,” a woman would say, looking at the display items on the shelf. I got used to this since there were a lot of moms trying to buy Christmas gifts for their twelve-, fourteen-, or sixteen-year-old children. I would often suggest to them some expensive gadget that they hadn’t heard of before, and they would say, “Yeah, that sounds like an idea.”
I would quickly grab it off the shelf before she took another minute to think, and just before I scanned it she would invariably say, “So, what is it supposed to do?” When I begin to explain the technical specifications—“It’s a wireless FM transmitter for MP3 players, and”—she would interrupt me with, “Actually, you know what? I am technically challenged.”
She would roll her eyes, and say, “My son will figure it out faster than me, let me just go ahead and get it.”
I would take her money, and thank her for her business. She would then say, “Thank you for your help, I know I would have never found this thing—you have saved me so much time.” According to hundreds of such women in Charlottesville, I saved them a lot of time over the course of one month. They came looking for a gift with a credit card ready in their hands. I suggested something they didn’t know existed, and they paid for it appreciatively. I helped them save their time so that they could spend their money faster.
Men, on the other hand, came to shop only ten minutes before the store closed, and they didn’t show up until a few days before Christmas. Oftentimes I didn’t have to help them make up their minds. They came prepared. They would walk in, go straight to a particular product, pick it up, bring it to the counter, take the credit card out of their wallet, and hand it to me. It would take less than one minute, and one word—thanks!—to complete the transaction.
None of my colleagues had to try to sell anything to anyone. It seemed like the sales for this month of the year had been set into cruise control mode. None of us had to make an effort or do anything special or different to keep the customers rolling in. All we had to do was to stand behind the cash register, and people would continue to show up with something to buy. A normal day in this season saw at least eight thousand dollars worth of sales—sometimes much more.
The mall had extra kiosks—twice as many as any other time of the year—that were selling gift items: lotions, cheap Chinese-made toys, hats, picture frames. Christmas music played nonstop, and a large man dressed as Santa Claus walked around picking little kids up in his arms, saying “Ho ho ho.” There were more lights in the mall than usual, and Christmas trees and wreaths adorned the entrances of every store.
Everyone seemed to be happy and in good spirits. It was the festive time of the year. Ben, the pretzel boy, didn’t have to walk around the mall with a tray full of samples—people came to his store on their own. Justin, the barista, didn’t have time to socialize because he had at least twenty people wanting to get coffee at any given minute. My Indian friends didn’t seem to mind the rude customers since they were making good money, and they knew that they would be on a flight to India soon. For the first time in a long while, no one complained about business being slow.