Black Friday?

 I spent more than fifty years on Black Fridays feeding shoppers on the day after Thanksgiving. Over the last ten years online shopping has caused a slowdown in store traffic on Black Friday. 

How badly behaved were shoppers in the "old days"? At the Zayre store in Greensboro on Black Friday in 1983, they broke down the front doors to get "Cabbage Patch Kids" dolls.  I guess those shoppers didn't understand the term "doorbusters" or maybe they did.

On Black Friday in 1976, after spending the morning shift slopping the shoppers coming by the Waffle House, I bought a Crock Pot at Penney's for $9.99. They were a new item at that time. I kept that Crock Pot for twenty years. Fifty cents a year, what a deal!!

In the days when Sears still had customers, we opened Tex & Shirley's at 6:00 AM and I still had time to walk across the street to Sears and get the tools that were on sale before we got busy. I save a lot of money by staying home on Black Fridays now.

However, traditions die hard, so now in the middle of Black Friday afternoon, I am going to Harbor Freight and Lowes just to see if something that "I need" is on sale. I didn't say that I saved all of my money.

The Army-Navy football game used to be the Saturday after Thanksgiving. Now it is about two weeks later. I am sure that it has something to do with television networks.

In my high school days, one year I ate three separate Thanksgiving dinners on Thanksgiving Day. I can't do that anymore and still walk. That and I never get any invitations to dinner. 

I do miss the old Waffle House days on Thanksgiving. Traditionally, someone who had the day off would invite all of us over to their house for Thanksgiving dinner. It usually took about three hours to eat dinner and talk about the Thanksgiving Day customers. Black Friday was actually a much more enjoyable day at the Waffle House. After the shift ended, we sat around the stock room, ate pumpkin pie and talked about rude and/or stupid customers who had visited us that day. I am always surprised that there are not more assaults on Black Friday.

Cyber Monday? What do you do? Get together and talk about sites you visited due to a missed keystroke? Getting up at 6:00 and turning on the computer doesn't rival meeting your friends at the Waffle House or Tex & Shirley's to fuel up before hitting the stores or recover after hitting the mall. There aren't a lot of good stories that involve online shopping. It's not like being in a mob fighting over the last Cabbage Patch Kid. That one could last a lifetime.  Free shipping on a socket set doesn't rival being the guy who grabbed the last Craftsman socket set off the table at Sears. Nobody shows off their $5.99 blender from Amazon. There are just some things that technology does not make better.

Hope you had a great Black Friday. Time for me to go to Harbor Freight and Lowes.