Ghosts of Black Fridays Past

[TheFugitive]

I am now more than two decades out of retail, and I have to say that my absolute favorite part of that is no longer having to take any part in Black Friday.

Black Friday always marked the start of a hectic holiday season where I'd be working 80+ hours per week and rarely seeing my family.  (a couple of times this caused me to sleep through Christmas, which is something I still regret).  It was always an exercise in mayhem with stressed employees and angry customers. (You ran out of Tickle Me Elmo?  You RUINED MY CHILD'S CHRISTMAS!!!)

I remember one year at Service Merchandise we opened at 6AM with a doorbuster of 100 Nintendo Game Boys at a loss-leader price.  My colleagues and I looked out at the mass of humanity gathered in the parking lot, daring each other to be the one to go and unlock the door.  All along cracking dark humor jokes about one of us being trampled to death.

Sadly that actually happened at a Walmart about a decade later.

On my last Black Friday at Hills the floor traffic seemed unusually light.  This perplexed our District Manager who was in our store at the time.  Unfortunately I had an answer for him.  It was the practice at the time for the Thanksgiving Day edition of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette to be stuffed chock-full with flyers for all of the Black Friday sales (I'm not sure what the current drill is as I've not subscribed to a dead tree newspaper in many years).  I had noticed that there was no Hills flyer in my paper on Thanksgiving, and so had my mother. 

I informed my DM of this and he immediately ran to make a phone call.  It turned out his worst fears were confirmed.  Due to some sort of inserting error the Hills ads had not gone out in the PG that day.

I thought the poor man was going to lay down on the floor behind our checkouts and cry.

I have been employed for many years in the IT industry and the day after Thanksgiving used to be a work day for us.  I eventually convinced our owner to give us the day off because pretty much the rest of the world was off, so you weren't reaching any customers anyway.  And because our office is located across the street from a mall I really dreaded having to drive anywhere near it on Black Friday.  It gave me flashbacks.