Penny Arcade and Black Friday.

I have to admit, this is pretty much my reaction:

As someone with experience in these matters – on both sides of the retail divide – Gabriel simply stays home for Black Friday.  And it’s not because he doesn’t like to buy things.  We discussed it all in the podcast you may absorb at some future date: he feels that the “deals” are illusory and that he doesn’t especially relish the thought of his heel on a retail worker’s trachea while he pours into the Consumer Battle Arena.  He has been that motherfucker in there, the one with the human throat, and even if there is still a pitched melee with or without him he can (at the very least) guarantee one less heel.

I don’t particularly criticize Black Friday on a regular basis, because there are elements of the criticism – and, more importantly, some of the critics – that taste more than a little of class snobbery. But I’ve done holiday retail. Pleasant, it is not.

9 thoughts on “Penny Arcade and Black Friday.”

  1. I know many cats for whom Black Friday is a thing – they spend Thanksgiving night, in between the turkey-coma and the sleep, poring over the newspaper circulars, plotting which stores and which deals .. then they – as a family, mind – wake before the sun and go shop, returning home to a hearty post-conquest luncheon of leftover wonderfulness.
    .
    That’s always been too much work for me .. I don’t eschew Black Friday out of anything more than an inherent sense of laziness. .
    Seriously, I don’t have “{copulate} you!” money, but I have enough that I can afford to say “{copulate} that {excrement}!” to a WalMart with hourly new specials (and throngs of locals chasing them) or a mall wall-to-wall with retro-valley-denziens…
    .
    It’s just extra work, which I don’t need, so .. I’ll pay a little extra (and click Moe’s Amazon link) and we’ll see if everything really can be air-dropped at least once. (by Amazon drones…?)
    .
    Mew

    1. CyberMonday sales are already eating into BlackFriday, and drone delivery may turn it into a landslide[package-slide?]. Such good news may not even be enemy action.

      1. Yep. What you encourage, you get more of .. and stores, by dropping prices closer to the big day for the last couple years *after* black friday have encouraged waiting until the last minute.
        .
        Mew

  2. Hm. Let’s see. Several years of retail experience and numerous scars from Black Fridays. Yeah. I’ll pass, thankyouverymuch.

  3. I’m with acat on this. I’m just to lazy (and not a morning person) to get up that early to save a few bucks. But I don’t begrudge anyone who wants to – ain’t America great!
    .
    .
    Even those establishments that decide to open on T-day. I won’t shop them and in doing so hope that they don’t derive enough sales to make it worth their time – though the S-i-L (to the left of Kucinich) put up a FB post about it, and I was right along with her, up until she started it being about other people’s right to do so, not just what she was or was not going to do.
    .
    .
    or something.

  4. I skipped black friday this year. I did swing by HEB for groceries late friday and grab some leftover cheap DVD’s. But for a real spit-on-this reaction to BF look into what “Cards Against Humanity” did for black friday.

Comments are closed.