SAGE ADVICE: Blackest of Fridays

I’m fairly certain Black Friday is why the terrorists and the French hate us. I can’t say for sure, since I don’t know any terrorists or French people on a first-name basis. But I doubt I miss my guess by far.

Some sources will tell you, if you’re looking around for such things, that Black Friday is so named because it’s the day that retailers traditionally move from the red and into the black, meaning they get profitable. It’s not, however, the busiest shopping day of the year, according to Snopes.com. Normally, that Web site, which specializes in investigating hoaxes and urban legends, says, Black Friday is in the top 10, but a lot lower than you might expect.

Besides, I don’t think it’s so much the willy-nilly consumption, the throwing around of money as if it were just so many slips of paper that makes the terrorists and the French hate us. Much as they’d deny it, I have my suspicions that the terrorists and French are as prone to spending more money than absolutely sane as the next person. I think it has more to do with the fact that we Americans haul our big butts to the store way before dawn, before any creature has a right to be stirring, to spend so obscenely.

There is absolutely no call, I, the terrorists and the French say, to be up waiting outside some brick-and-mortar store before even the most God-fearing among us would venture out for Easter sunrise services.

Just look at the list I found on the Internet: Best Buy and Circuit City are each planning to open at 5 a.m. Friday. Kohl’s is opening at 4 a.m. Costco starts its sale at midnight. Old Navy’s begins at the now reasonable looking hour of 5 a.m.

But wait a minute. If you find yourself in a Costco at midnight-oh-one, sober up, go home and spend some time with your family. There’s nothing you need to buy in bulk that can’t wait until after you’ve had a good night’s sleep and a nice, refreshing morning cup of coffee. Furthermore, if you find yourself outside an Old Navy at 5 a.m., thinking, “Hey, I should go in there and get me one of them there cute tops,” think again. The very fact you are up at 5 a.m., unless of course you are still up and drunken from the late night at Costco, in which case you really should go on home and sober up before your family reports you missing, suggests that just maybe you aren’t in the Old Navy demographic. That store sells stuff to teens and twenty-somethings. I’ve yet to meet a teen or twenty-something up at 5 a.m. who wasn’t drunken, up against his will by the threat of bodily harm or lying about her age. An Old Navy early bird sale should be for those who can rise around 9 a.m. Period. And Kohl’s. Please. 4 a.m.? Even professional criminals, the ones who count on you being asleep while they break into your house and steal your DVD player, are asleep at 4 a.m.

I don’t know how we got here.

At one point, according to “The Waltons” we Americans didn’t go in for all that conspicuous consumption. We all traded at the one place in town that had everything, sort of the 1930s version of Wal-Mart without the harsh lighting, the lead-based toys and the irritating piped-in music, and we called that place Ike Godsey’s. Then something happened. Sometime after the Walton boys got home from World War II, they stopped shopping at Ike’s place. They moved off the mountain and became suburbanites. Within a generation or two, the Waltons had invented soccer, minivans and all-you-can-eat buffets.

And shopping became a violent, full-contact, not-for-the-weak, repulsive blood sport in America.  It was about the time today’s terrorist’s fathers and the French started hating us. A few years, give or take a dozen, after the Waltons had settled the fertile land within the beltways. It was in the days when gas lines had Detroit quaking, Mad Magazine was making light of the string of hijackings that took passengers on side trips to Cuba and grown women were beating up other grown women for Cabbage Patch Dolls. Those ages between the Great Depression, which saw Americans fighting for survival, and the mild depression, which finds Americans ingesting copious amounts of antidepressants, are dark to be sure. It’s not, to say the least, Grandpa’s America. Unfortunately, I like that Walton’s America (as distinguished from Sam Walton’s America). You better believe that if Ike Godsey held him a Black Friday sale, it’d start at a reasonable time, even if the Baldwin sisters had been waiting outside since way before dawn. There wouldn’t be anyone stabbing anyone else over a Tickle Me Elmo.

And the French and the terrorists might not hate us so much.