Back in Black

After a year of COVID canceling everything, last week saw the return of the most American of holidays in all its glory. The one holiday that truly celebrates the American way of life and defines us as a culture.

I am, of, course, talking about Black Friday shopping.

With the Thanksgiving leftovers packed away in the fridge and print ads distributed by the newspapers (or online, if you're into that sort of thing), the Christmas shopping season unofficially began on Friday morning.

That's right, Friday morning. Who would have thought?

Because, as we all know, Black Friday hasn't really been Black Friday for several years now. The popular shopping day really gained steam at the turn of the century and, as hype around the annual shopping holiday grew, the start times got earlier and earlier as stores found themselves trapped in a race-to-the-bottom.

It's been ten years since Wal-Mart crossed the Rubicon, opening up at 10:00 p.m. on Thanksgiving Day. Competing retailers followed suit and before long most stores started opening as early as Thursday afternoon, complicating Thanksgiving plans for the families of countless retail workers across the country.

To the shock of absolutely nobody, a fun event centered on consumerism and unchecked corporate greed ultimately devoured itself. Black Friday stopped being fun and, more importantly to some, stopped being profitable. Thursday openings cannibalized Friday sales and more people started shopping online rather than go out at all.

By 2015, the self-destructive nature of Black Friday's downward spiral was evident, and yet it still took last year's pandemic forcibly shutting everything down for the corporate world to finally scale back their post-Thanksgiving arms race.

When Black Friday shopping returned this year, it returned with some changes. Online sales are more prominent, sale prices extend for weeks, and, most importantly, Black Friday actually started on Friday.

Not even at midnight either. My first stop this year was a store that opened at a comfortable 5:00 a.m.

It was fun. The crowds weren't as wild as they have been in the past. Most retailers had their Black Friday sale prices started when people were still defrosting their Thanksgiving turkeys, which has alleviated a lot of the stress and demand to go out before the crack of dawn Friday morning. Anybody looking for a good deal on a new television could have picked one up pretty much at any point in November. Without the lure of "doorbusters" drawing people in, the early morning shopping has largely been left to those who just want to shop for the fun of it.

I'm good with that.

For my experience, I met my sister in the city. We waited in the cold, coffee in hand, and once the doors opened, we casually roamed the aisles looking for gift ideas for the rest of the family. We picked up some things we needed, a few things we didn’t, and then moved on to the next big-box retailer to see what they had. It was busy, but not shoulder-to-shoulder busy as it has been in years past. Getting in and out of parking lots wasn't difficult and there was no particular rush to find a specific item.

Another silver lining of the pandemic is that it has normalized wearing face coverings in public. Something you would think would be more common in a state where the pre-dawn air can literally hurt your face anyway, but I'd never really given much consideration to masks or scarves until "social distancing" entered our common lexicon.

When everything is said and done, I'm glad that Black Friday has gone back to, more or less, how it used to be. It's nice to have the fun shopping experience without the pang of guilt that comes with contributing to the demand that forces retail workers to sacrifice their own holiday to work registers.

Now to see where things go from here. Will history repeat itself? Will Wal-Mart push things back again or has the corporate world learned that sometimes it's okay to just let things be good and fun?

Travis Fischer is a news writer for Mid-America Publishing and managed to resist buying a new television he didn't really need this year.