Hello 4 am. I haven’t seen you in a while.

I’m about a quarter way through life, and I’ve never braved the black Friday hordes.  I have shopped on this day before, but always at godly hours like 10 am or 11 am (aka God’s favorite hours).  This year was different.  No more sleeping cozily in a bed while other people stampede each other for large screen TVs.  This year I was going to be there!  I was going to push and shove and foam at the mouth in order to make Santa proud! 

What does it mean to do early bird shopping?  It means I woke up at 3:30 am in order to hit the mall by 4.  I wasn’t getting in line at 4 am.  That’s when the stores opened. 

As I sprinted across the parking lot, flailing my arms and shouting “let’s buy some stuff!” I noticed that my brother and I were just about the only two people in the mall…. I think the stores finally took it too far, and people just said “4 am?  Fuck it”.  Or they were at WalMart.  One of those two. 

So instead of braving hordes of angry, 2000s style zombie-people I wound up shuffling & grunting around the empty mall with twenty 1950s style zombie-people.  And it was really nice.  I think actually I might prefer shopping at 4 am over shopping at 10 am.    Though part of me still hopes that every year the shopping time will get 1 hour earlier.  Just think – in a decade we’ll skip Thanksgiving all together and do our shopping that evening.  

Trust me, it’s going to be awesome.   

 

 

The power of the consumer

Whenever I have a horrible experience at a store I like to go on their website and write a strongly-worded email of complaint.  While I highly doubt this has very much of an effect, the simple act of getting it all out really helps.  I also fantasize about having hate letters that are so well thought-out and logical that it drastically changes the customer service of the places I go.  Just recently I discovered that the Subway in my neighborhood – which I complain about all the time – went out of business.  Holy cow!  But I can’t take credit for this big win alone: I’d like to thank the disinterested salespeople and the broken credit card machine that made it all possible.   We did it!

On a side note, this is one of several habits that make me sound like a 60 year-old.  I should add a category here just for that.