Black Friday & Cyber-Monday: Vendors Puzzled at Lack of Lines of Rednecks
Well it’s now the Tuesday after Thanksgiving, which means yesterday was “Cyber-Monday”. Just as most normal folks don’t go shopping on Black Friday, I didn’t leave my PC on Cyber-Monday. Would you with all those lunatic shoppers out there, who will stomp you because you added the last item to your online shopping cart? How about all the lines circling major online shopping sites’ parking lots?
Well of course that shit doesn’t exist. Cyber-Monday is another advertising ploy, and if you fell for it: shame on you. You can find the same deals in July as you saw online yesterday. You’ll see them again in September, and basically every month of the year…
Maybe it’s our desire to be part of something which drives these “shopping days”. Perhaps peoplel want so desperately to be part of something, that they’ll line up in a parking lot a day before the store opens (missing precious moments with the family or friends) just to take a stab at reaching the PS3 counter first. Well here’s two newflashes for you:
- You’re fuckin’ idiot
- Your kid ain’t gonna love you any more just because you got the PS3 at 5:01am on Friday morning.
People who shop like this make this thing worse. The stores want you to trample each other. Each time an act of violence gets reported on the news, it means the store was featured on the news, and most people watching the news (because they’re just as dumb as you are) want to know why there’s so much fever over their store. These executives will sit in board rooms and light cigars with hundred-dollar bills, laughing.
The book” “Night“, was written by Elie Wiesel. Wiesel is a Holocaust survivor from Hungary, and this is his story. In the book, Wiesel recalls a scene where the starved Jews were moved from one concentration camp in Poland to another in Austria. As the train rolled through a city, amused German and Austrian civilians would toss a single scrap of bread into the middle of a cattle-wagon car full of the hungry Jews. They would laugh at the sight of these bony, scrawny men killing one another for a crouton-sized piece of bread.
Do you think for a minute that what Best Buy/Wal-Mart/Circuit City/etc.. executives are doing is any different? Replace the starved Jews with the Black Friday shopper, and the piece of bread with some electronic device, and you’ve literally got the same scenario.
I want my Christmas back. When I was little, it wasn’t above me (or any other kid) to carry a holiday catalog around, dropping subtle hints as to which of the toys in there I wanted for Christmas. Kids do that. But parents? Wheeling and dealing, punching and kicking, hitting and -yes, it’s true- biting to get toys? C’mon folks…act like adults, and stop caving to the retail industry to put yourself or someone else in harm’s way just to get a toy. Be smart.
Yes, I really did make a Holocaust comparison when talking about Christmas shopping!
