Saturday, November 29, 2008

Red Friday

Black Friday is normally a busy time of the year. Our consumeristic fever breaks 105° and in our delusion, we travel at ungodly hours to purchase obscene quantities of stuff -- that is, if we beat the crowds. So this year, I was contemplating faring the seas of disgruntled shoppers that light up the beginning of our Christmas season by going to Circuit City. Though filing for bankruptcy earlier this month, they still released an ad with some pretty good deals. Sadly, Jenn's brothers did not want to go Black Friday shopping at 5:00 am to cash in on the deals. So I went to bed and didn't get up until 8:00 am.

Around 9:00 am, Jenn and I decided to check out Circuit City anyway. I figured that there wouldn't be any deals left, given our nation's history of psychotic shoppers mowing one another over for pieces of metal and plastic (though that still happened this year). Alas! when we arrived at Circuit City, we were surprised to see a proportionately small number of shoppers -- and even managed to get all of the Black Friday sales we wanted.

This absurd phenomenon has become what I now coin "Red Friday." With our nation's economic crisis, there is no feasible way that most companies could recouperate their losses with the terrible shopper turnout. My hopes is that this will start becoming a trend; people purchasing fewer things that they don't need. Perhaps this is a blessing in disguise, once we get past the "crisis" part and people start regaining their senses about their ill purchasing habits.

We all need a change in that arena, especially with the crazy levels of poverty in the world.

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