Black Friday

Unlike Friday the 13th, this is not an oft-occurring phenomena. It happens once a year, and it is always - without fail - the Friday following Thanksgiving. After giving thanks for family, food and friends, many make it a tradition to go out and spend all their money on Christmas shopping. That would be the morning after not giving thanks for all the debt you are in anyway... and will shortly be plunging farther into that abyss.

Well, too late.

At any rate, an interesting bit of trivia (I do so love useless bits of information). Black Friday is so named not because as anyone who has ever survived the holidays in retail of any kind knows is the WORST day of the year to work in said retail. It is rather monikered this because it is the one day of the year that any mall-based business is in the black, not the red. Hence, Black Friday.

That is all a very short-lived thing, and more so as time marches on and people turn more and more to Internet shopping. Quite honestly, I would not go anywhere near a mall from Thanksgiving until 3 January ever again. Unfortunately, Luis does not agree and will happily drag me into any shopping establishment at this time of year more than any other. So last night I grudgingly agreed to allow myself to be pulled into the Rockaway Townsquare Mall (kicking and screaming and making many biting, sarcastic remarks - yes, there is a price to be paid for my little concessions!) on Black Friday under one very stringent provisio... we go first thing in the morning, as the mall is opening, or we will never make it in.

Well. Who knew?

Have you seen what the stores are doing this year? I went online around 0540 this morning knowing that the malls have extended hours for this weekend through Christmas, and figuring that rather than opening at 1000, they'd be opening at 0830, or mayble 0900. OK, maybe some nutty places, like the department stores (Macy's, JC Penny's, Bamburger's - does that store still exist? - all the places I don't shop), would open at 0800, an hour ahead of the smaller, more specialised stores. Well... I went onto the Rockaway site - not the brightest people on the planet - as they had no special hours posted on the main page for the holidays. (Everyone else had the brains to update their Web sites appropriately...) All stores have special hours now - otherwise there'd be a losing competition for those stores that don't - so I knew that couldn't be right.

I went to other mall Web sites and sure enough, they've all got special hours. Special hours for the next four weeks and special hours for the next three days. I was absolutely not prepared for what the special hours were! Willowbrook Mall in Wayne was opening up at 0600. 0600! What the hell?! Paramus Park was opening at 0500! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA! So I called the Rockaway Mall, got the hours part of the voice system, and they reported opening at 0500 and some stores at 0600! Ye gods!

So. When I called for the hours, some completely insane people - a lot of them - were already shopping for bloody near to an hour! When there wouldn't be any daylight for another hour!

I can't get over that.

I go into work and I get in between 0550 and 0615. I prefer it that way, as it allows me time to get things done without the constant interruptions that is any HR person's life. I want that. I want regularity and consistency and I absolutely need some downtime, some non-people, private time, to get a lot of little things and some big things done. But it is entirely my choice and I like it that way.

If I still worked in retail, I would be super unbelievably pissed off if I had to get up at 0330 to get to work by 0430 to prep and be ready for the incredibly stupid masses that flood any mall on Black Friday. I worked Black Friday twice in my life and so hated it that I refused outright to ever work it again. Never again. Even when I crawled back into the hated world of retail again in 2001, I found the job after the Thanksgiving weekend. I was not going to work on Black Friday. Ever. Never ever.

Now I know why!