Black Friday: The High Cost of Low Prices

*fittedwearer's note: quick shoutout to newly known reader Tre! He was one of the anonymous umf'ers I discussed in the Thanksgiving special, and decided to reveal himself. Thanks a lot, bruh. More of y'all should do that so I can show you your due love for wasting 5-20 perfectly good minutes a day with me. Aight, let's get this started.

It's the Friday after Thanksgiving and you know what that means...it's Black Friday! Yes, on this one day every store is offerin 67% off everyfuckinthing and folk are comin out in droves to take advantage of the ubiquitous sales. $100 xboxes! Yay! $250 Toshiba laptops! All riiiiiiight! 2-for-1 lap dances! Whoo, sign me up! It's called Black Friday, but people of all flavors, united in savings, can prance around and save money all day (right, Jade?). It's great...let there be savings for the masses.

However, like most good things, mafuckas take it way too far. You see, people were actually camped outside of stores last night so they could be the first super saver through the door to grab all kinds of discount items. These kind of people get a smartdumb award in my opinion (thx for lettin me borrow that, Tone.) because while laying in the parking lot of a Wal-Mart in a sleeping bag all night (especially in the wind, rain, and sub-40 degree temperatures from last night) enables you to run in at 5:00 am and scoop up that half-price DVD player, it's also fuckin stupid. I mean, yeah you saved 60 dollars, but...look what you went through for it. Let's play a game where I prove your time is valuable. Minimum wage (you being paid for yor time) is 7 bucks an hour, give or take. You laid on the cold wet asphalt or shivered in your car for 8 hours while you waited for the store to open. The amount of your time you wasted waiting to save a few dollars is worth at least $56. Congrats, you just saved 4 dollars! (and that's assuming you don't have to pay medical bills when you catch pneumonia after camping outside a fuckin store in NOVEMBER.) I think paying a little more is worth my time...especially since I make more than minimum wage.

That's not even to get into what happens once the doors open. People see that door open and lose their thrifty fuckin minds. You've seen the footage on the news...the doors open at showtime and folk stampede into the store like they're escaping from a burning building, thrashing wildly at those around them and trampling those unfortunate enough to end up underfoot. (Seriously, how much does THAT suck as a death method? You're sitting there in the afterlife with some other dead folk discussing how y'all died, everyone else has a cool story about an explosion, a car crash or a stingray and you have to tell everybody that you got stomped to death at Toys R' Us trying to scoop a cheap Nintendo Wii.) Its so extra. I don't know why, but overzealous shoppers seem to think low, low prices mean the rules of the street are somehow temporarily suspended. Na, dawg. You shove me trying to get to a deeply discounted GPS or snatch the last portable flatscreen out of my hand in a store, and the same thing is gonna happen as if you pushed me or snatched one of my items on the street, i.e. I'm gonna serve you up a fresh, piping hot ass-whuppin...I guarantee you there's no mail in rebate for that. Don't let a sale get the dogshit beaten out of you.

Overall, Black Friday is a cool way to get all your holiday shopping (and random "I just wanna buy shit" shopping) out of the way and save some cash doing so. I really have no problem with the concept of the day...after all, I like spending less money for more shit as much as the next man. I'm just saying it's not a way of life or a contact sport, and folk seem to have it twisted. Think about that when you're up at 3 in the morning freezing on a sidewalk, hurdling a counter to get those $3 cds as stocking stuffers or doing the Heisman to keep another hyperagressive shopper from taking whatever cheap product you have tucked under your arm as you sprint to the register. It's just not that serious people...at least from under here.