Three Joys of Black Friday

Pushing, shoving and angry crowds are a blind person’s nightmare. For this reason, I limit my serious shopping to that one special day each year—Black Friday.

I’m not being sarcastic and haven’t taken leave of my senses. I think Black Friday’s been given a bum wrap. So, I decided to share three joys of Black Friday to offer an alternative opinion.

Tradition dictates the event be held on the Friday following America’s Thanksgiving Day feast, which is the fourth Thursday of November. While our neighbors across the Great Pond don’t stuff themselves with roast turkey and all the trimmings, some of the U.K. merchants have decided to give the extreme savings shopping day a go—even calling it Black Friday.

The BBC News echoed the reports out of America, declaring the massive crowds of bargain-hunting shoppers fighting one another for the last sale item on the shelf. Perhaps it’s because I leave the house before the sun’s up, but my experience has always been positive.

Here are my three joys of Black Friday:

One: Camaraderie

On Black Friday, every shopper’s my friend. I have only to lift an item off the shelf to strike up a new friendship. A shopper rushes to tell me where I can find it cheaper or a better brand for the same price.

This year, one enthusiastic lady gushed with excitement as she demonstrated how to use an iPhone to display a lower price for the same pressure cooker she’d seen in another store. To her delight, the manager lets her pay the lower price, so she didn’t need to rush over to the first shop. The shopper radiated joy as she clung to her even-more-reduced price pressure cooker. She so heartwarmingly urged me to get in on the savings that I almost bought a pressure cooker I didn’t need just to add to her pleasure.

All over them all and stand-alone stores, shoppers offered advice and solicited opinions on products and prices. It felt a lot like shopping with a vast extended family. Everyone received the suggestions in the spirit intended and displayed no hesitation to request an opinion from a stranger. On Black Friday, I found no strangers; just people whose names I’d yet to learn.

Two: Compassion

On the other 364 days of the year, just the mention of going shopping brings an enormous ball of tension into the pit of my stomach. I rarely go shopping unless it’s entirely unavoidable. Being totally blind, I feel like a pinball as the scurrying crowds rushing around the Mall knock into me—first bouncing me to the left and then to the right.

Sometimes, the bouncer notices my white cane as I pick it up off the floor, and he or she offers sincere apologies. I just smile and restrain myself from quoting that place in my mobility lesson that says the presence of the white cane gives the visually disabled the right-of-way.

I have no such reservations about shopping on one particular day of the year because everything’s different on Black Friday. It’s as though my white cane had somehow illuminated into a brilliant neon wand; no one ever bounces me around.

If someone accidentally backs into me across the narrow aisle, the customer is overly kind in offering apologies. No one is rude to me on Black Friday. No one behaves as though a blind person shouldn’t be in the store.

I can’t back this up with any statistics on the behavior of Black Friday shoppers, but personally, I think it has to do with the Christmas music streaming into the Mall corridors and inside every shop. Everywhere I went, I joined the singing choir of bargain-hunters.

Hard to be cross with someone next to you when you’re both belting out “Jingle bells, jingle bells, jingle bells rock,” right? All over the stores, familiar Christmas carols added beauty to the colorful, decorated environment.

Black Friday is the first day all the merchants play Christmas music in their stores. Most of the songs are old familiar favorites, so it’s easy for all of the shoppers to sing along. The novelty will wear off soon enough; but for this one day of the year, everyone loves to hear the tunes as they move from shop to shop.

Three: Clearance-Level Prices

Though recent years have added evening hours on Thursday to the shopping frenzy, most of us who haven’t joined the overnight lines waiting for the doors to open, head for the shops early on Friday morning.

To get in on the steepest cuts in prices, one needs to finish at the registers by noon in some stores and one o’clock in others. Black Friday shopping takes a bit of logistical planning to be sure we can travel to the various stores in the most time-efficient manner.

Individual lists are compiled from the mountain of colorful advertisements in the Thursday newspaper, as the Thanksgiving feast is being digested. “Don’t forget to clip and take the coupons to get that additional percentage off the low-price sale tag, “ my friend reminded me.

A colleague conducted an online search to verify the original price of the items for me. She confirmed the sale prices reflected huge discounts on the chosen goods. Anticipating the enormous savings is part of the fun.

Here’s one example of our special doorbuster deals: The colored newspaper insert boasted the price of the item had been slashed by two-thirds—as long as the customer purchased it before noon on Friday. Because I had a credit card for that store, the cashier knocked off an additional 15%. The previous week, I received a coupon that reduced the sale price of any store item another 10%. Don’t ya just love it?

The item priced $149,95 had a final charge of $38 and change. Or, it would have if I’d remembered to take that 10% off coupon, sigh. Add the $4.2 back; I paid $42 and change plus tax. (No credit charges to add because I only use the card for these discounts.)

Our shopping list contained items we really did need, so buying them at such reduced prices gave an enormous boost to the stretched budget.

Even after the Doorbuster hours have ended, significant savings can still be found on the shelves and racks in all the stores until closing that night. For this reason, our little group of like-minded shoppers converged on a favorite restaurant for lunch at one o’clock. Having shared details of our bargains, off we went to finish our shopping list. Most of us made it home by 5:30 that evening.

These are only three joys of Black Friday; there are a lot more. I hope you’ll join the holiday throng next year if you missed it last week.

You might want to take advantage of all the Christmas music playing this year to study up, so you’ll be ready to join the singing shoppers on Black Friday next year.

In addition, sharpening the action of your Reticular Activating System might help you find the location of that specific product faster. RAS isn’t just for blind people, you know. Not familiar with RAS? Check it out by clicking on this link:

Thank You, Lord, for Giving Us RAS!

Happy shopping!