Your 2017 Black Friday Story

[RazzmaTazz]

So now that it's December 6 already, I'm sure everyone has recovered from Black Friday. I know that this is probably a U.S. thing mostly, so you'll have to tell me if other countries participate in this annual madness.

The store that I work at is one of the major ones in the U.S. and the world. Probably doesn't take much to figure out which one. We started getting stuff in for the Black Friday sale about a week before the event. Lots of TV's and housewares stuff. Loads of toys and clothing. And of course the electronics.

Since the store was open on Thanksgiving Day (Yes, I was working) the sale didn't start until 6pm that night. It was about 2pm when we started roping off asiles in the grocery department to make queue lines for the bigger ticket items like the TV's and iPhones and Xboxes. This really seemed to piss of some of the customers who where there to shop normally because now you could only enter the grocery asiles from one side and when you got to the other end you had to turn around to go out the same way. And no, we didn't allow you to go under the ropes!!

It got even worse at 4pm when the first of the queue lines started to get the customers waiting for the specific items. I was in charge of watching one of the larger TV's and the first person in line to wait got there and hour and forty five minutes before the sale started. By the time that 5pm came around you could forget about trying to do your grocery shopping. You couldn't get down the asiles.

Right behind where I was were the displays for all the movie DVDs and video games stretching the whole length of the meat, cheese, and dairy wall. When 6pm came and they were unwrapped it was like everyone diving to get the movies. Come on! Were they really that good anyhow? My TV asile actually moved pretty good. People came and got their TVs and no pushing and shoving.

All over the store it was a pretty big mad house though. There was only one fight that broke out that I heard about with some people fighting over the last of the hover boards before they ran out.

What amazed me the most though was that by about 8pm the store had cleared out and was back to a manageable level. At 9pm we started to tear down the Black Friday sale and by 10:30 the store was back to normal. You'dn never know that we had just had a sale. Then I went home and crashed.

It was nuts, but it wasn't as bad as I thought it was going to be. Still scratch my head though that people will go through that for those types of things. And Black Friday should actually be on Friday and not start on Thursday. Some of us want to celebrate the holiday with family, and we can't if we are at work with some crazy sale.

The funny part of it all is that all the items that were on the Black Friday sale are still at that price. It didn't end! Sure we ran out of things. And with the sale being online as well there was actually no need to actually go to the store. You could have avoided the whole thing and had what you wanted shipped to you.

So that is my Black Friday 2017 tale. What was yours like?

 

[trencherman]

We celebrate Thanksgiving roughly a month ahead of you guys in the US but merchants anywhere will be merchants so we do have Black Friday sales too in addition to its former equivalent among Commonwealth countries, Boxing Day sales. So now we have two crazy days for end of the year sales, that is, if you are not counting the occasional Midnight Madness sales usually held by furniture and home appliances warehouse stores. I don’t recall taking part in any form of madness even as a young person so all of these sales simply leave me cold.

 

[RufusMc]

We had the madness of Black Friday in the UK as well, still got Boxing Day to go, then the New Year sales sigh. Interesting checking out the price tracking websites to see things going up in price the months before and then coing down for the sales. Can't say I ever get mad for these sales, tried it one year got crushed in the stampede, never done it again.