Two ‘Black Fridays’

Black Friday of course is the Friday after Thanksgiving. It got its name because traditionally, sales are high on that day and the stores finally are able to make a profit for the year – black being the color ink accountants use to denote monetary gain (just as red denotes a loss).

The day has turned rather ugly lately, as retail merchants take advantage of the occasion, open their stores early and heavily discount their prices in the early hours. Consequently, huge mobs sometimes wait for the store to open, and rush the shelves crudely, rudely and maniacally when the doors open.

But that’s not what I wanted to talk about.

Usually I don’t venture into retail territory until the week after Thanksgiving, ‘cause I value my bones, my flesh, and my life. However, I got caught up in the Black Friday mess twice ; both times were on the mainland.

The first was in 2003 when we spent Thanksgiving at my son’s new home in San Jose. Naive fools that we were, we decided to drive to the huge Gilroy Premium Outlets in the land of garlic. Big mistake! The freeways were packed, the parking lot was packed, the restaurants were packed, and the stores were overflowing with people.

I ended up driving the car around, dropping off family, picking them up when they were done, then driving them to another area.

The second time was this year. I’d learned my lesson about shopping on Black Friday, but being in Las Vegas, we unfortunately had to get from here to there and back again. We didn’t hit any shopping malls, deciding to wait until after the weekend.

But we did get caught up in traffic. Huge traffic! It took us 45 minutes to get from the north end of the Vegas Strip (Stratosphere) to Tropicana. The thing is, we HAD to take that route, as Interstate 15 was jammed and looked like a parking lot. We didn’t get a heck of a lot done that day.

Black Friday … bleah!