A Brief History Of Black Friday
- Flickr / mjmckenzi
Black Thursday
With not enough greedy, sometimes-fatal shopping incidents on record to crush our holiday spirit, stores — namely Wal-Mart, Sears, K-Mart, Target, and Toys “R” US — have spent the past couple of years inching Black Friday back into actual Thanksgiving, and this year are opening stores at 8 p.m. The idea of getting it together to leave the house the night of Thanksgiving, let alone shop, let alone being forced by your employers to come into work and deal with bloated, possibly drunk shoppers, is overwhelming. To name just a few things that are in pretty awful taste here. Whatever happened to just staying home and re-watching all the South Park Thanksgiving episodes, or getting into polite-but-very-tense arguments with your conservative relatives? These always seemed like such nice family traditions to me. Why sully them?
Anyway, if you really feel bad, Occupy now has a bunch of advice on how to participate and still be a nice person — pay in cash, support local businesses, try not to trample anyone. We’ll all get through this.
Follow Virginia K. Smith on Twitter @vksmith.