Yesterday was Thanksgiving, and I am particularly thankful for many things this year, as I posted yesterday. This morning, I resumed my daily ritual of morning walks/runs that I’ve adopted to improve my health. Typically, I head to one of the many lovely parks provided by the City of Arlington, and on my way this morning, I drove by a couple of retailers whose parking lots were populated with more cars than usual for that time of day. And something occurred to me that hadn’t resonated for many years: It’s Black Friday!

No, not the 1869 financial crisis. (He said, knowing most people wouldn’t be aware of any such event.) And not even the term from Philadelphia in the 1950s. (Feel free to look that one up, too.) I speak, of course, of the Day After Thanksgiving, when retailers like to pretend their accounting books go from the red (taking losses) into the black (making profits) thanks to the surge in holiday shopping. Because now that Thanksgiving is over, it’s time to gear up for Christmas. Commence the Christmas shopping.

A little personal history here: I grew up in a household that was very much built on a foundation of paper – books, magazines, and more than one daily newspaper. So I read a lot, although I will freely admit that I was more devoted to the periodicals than I was the books. I suspect it’s the part of me that decided to major in history in college; after all, newspapers and magazines that document what’s happening around us each day will become primary sources of historical knowledge in the future. I just know I preferred them.

Sundays, as it turned out, weren’t just for Mass. They also included the ritual of the Sunday paper. (And we had TWO!) If you recall, the Sunday newspaper in its heyday was packed. There were stories that had been built over the course of the week by the staff, additional features, additional opinions, more reader letters, and of course, ads. Lots and lots of ads, because retailers would publish their specials weekly. Now, as retailers began adopting Black Friday as a positive marketing tactic in the 1980s, the newspaper on Thanksgiving began to grow. Black Friday specials, and hence, more ads. The trend continued into the 1990s, and its growth was fairly organic. The “holiday doorbuster” came about, where a store that normally opened at 10:00am would open as early as 9:00, or even 8:00, or *gasp* 7:00am on the day after Thanksgiving. And they would feature limited-time specials that would expire at or shortly after the normal opening time. The idea, naturally, was to get you into the store earlier than normal, knowing that a given special might draw you, but you would still shop for additional items to get your Christmas shopping done. It was a classic marketing tactic, even if the special itself was a loss leader.

And I will freely admit, I loved it. There was something really cool about checking out the ads in the paper sometime on Thanksgiving Day (for me, usually after food and football), then getting up early on the day after Thanksgiving to shop a little. It was a neat break in the routine that said “It’s the Holidays.” I fondly remember 1996, when I headed to Kay-Bee Toys at The Parks at Arlington with my new sister-in-law so that I could get some cool toys for my niece and nephews on their doorbuster specials. Call me a sucker; I don’t care. I genuinely enjoyed it. I woke up at 6:00am to get to the mall by 7:00am for an 8:00am opening. There were perhaps 50 people waiting outside the store that morning, and everyone was actually very chill about what they wanted. No running, no stampeding, no yelling, no complaining. The employees didn’t seem to mind, either, since they only had to arrive a couple of hours earlier than normal. It was genuinely a fun experience. And these experiences remained fun for several years.

And then they killed it. The opening time kept getting earlier and earlier. Eventually, retailers started opening at midnight. The specials started getting more ridiculous in that they were much cheaper, but severely limited. That really only invites the madness, the running, the stampeding, the fighting, the complaining. The fun of Black Friday dissipated for me. I knew I was definitely done with it the year my in-laws camped out overnight outside Best Buy for the chance at a laptop for $500. A 6:00am wake-up during a holiday is fine, but I’m not sitting awake all night in the cold just to save some money. What’s worse is that the retailers started working with manufacturers to create specific Black Friday merchandise. You were no longer getting a normal item at a remarkable price; you were getting a once-only item that was created cheaply to sell to you cheap. Not the same.

Now, I realize that Frank Costanza created Festivus in 1997 in response to retail madness, and that was during the time when I still enjoyed Black Friday. I will admit that I never worked hard to get the specific hot toy of the year – no Cabbage Patch Kids or Tickle Me Elmo. I suppose that my experience might have been different if I was diving deep into Black Friday shopping instead of just dipping my toes.  I was at Kay-Bee instead of Toys R Us, where it probably was crazier. I might stop at Target, but never Walmart. I’m certain there are some people out there who worked retail in the 1990s, hated Black Friday back then, and think I’m insane for saying I used to enjoy it. That’s fair, and my perspective is no doubt framed by my personal experience. But the bottom line for me is that, as is often the case in the USA, marketers and retailers decided to take things past the point of diminishing returns. Too much of a good thing. Kill the goose that laid the golden egg.

Remember when Target, Walmart, and other stores actually opened on Thanksgiving Day? I can think of only one good thing about those days. My oldest, who has autism, would always be really wound up after spending Thanksgiving at two different houses with extended family from both his parents. So the ability to take him out to Grand Prairie Premium Outlets at 8:00pm on Thanksgiving so that he could walk with his father and release some energy was valuable. But I also recall feeling really terrible for the employees who had to leave their own families early that day to go to work. And I wondered about the benefits for the shoppers. Was it really worth it to go out on Thanksgiving Day to acquire more stuff?

Mercifully, those days are now behind us. But along the way, Black Friday has gone from an organic, interesting (and perhaps maddening) retail phenomenon to yet another contrived concoction of American advertisers. After the advent of Cyber Monday for online retailers, the actual concept of Black Friday has morphed into essentially a weeks-long festival of discounts online and in-store. If I had a nickel for every time I see “Black Friday Starts NOW” in my e-mail, I probably wouldn’t need to worry about saving any money on their special deals. The fact that retailers are willing to give us 15-30% off everything for a week or more is basically an admission that they’re inflating their margins most of the year. And instead of lower prices consistently feeding a stable retail environment that survives, if not thrives, we get inflated prices for much of the year with brief periods of unbridled spending, insane traffic, long lines, massive crowds, and a generally miserable experience.

And then there’s Small Business Saturday, “brought to you by American Express.” It was started in 2010 as a purported effort to support smaller stores who were harmed by the 2008 financial crisis. And while it seems like a well-meaning concept (because who thinks it’s a bad idea to help small business?), it is bitterly ironic that American Express is involved. Ask any small business owner, and they’ll freely tell you they cannot afford to accept American Express because the transaction fees for sellers are higher than nearly every other card. But then, irony in the USA appears to have quietly died many years ago, so who knows?

So Black Friday used to appeal to me, but it’s grown tiresome and I now actively seek to avoid it. And yet, I take heart in this development. My children are now grown, and their association with Christmas has evolved such that they value experiences and the spirit of the season far more than they do the quantity of presents under the tree. So we spend more of this season going out to see lights, watching movies, and of course, participating in Mass and other church activities. We still exchange a modest number of gifts among our family each Christmas, but we really have moved on from the consumer-driven aspects of the holiday. It’s refreshing. Meanwhile, I will always have my romanticized memories of a gentler time in American retail. And I will tip my hat to stores like REI, which closes on Black Friday for their “Opt Outside” initiative – they encourage everyone to avoid shopping and pursue an outdoor activity after all the food from Thursday. They even give their employees a paid day off to do the same. Sounds like a plan to me.