The day after Black Friday
Writing by treason on Saturday, 26 of November , 2005 at 7:29 pm
The old Boris Karloff movie? No, the biggest shopping day of the year, silly! As usual, I stayed home and watched the footage of Americans stampeding to get to the bargains. If I play my cards right, I will have no reason whatsoever to go to a mall before Christmas. I support the economy, but I have no intention of going out and shopping for things we don’t need. T and I don’t exchange gifts during the holidays. We give each other things throughout the year - holidays don’t dictate when we need to be generous. For instance, he just went out recently to buy a pair of shoes to replace a crusty pair of Reeboks and he picked up a Killers CD for me. I’d mentioned I’d seen them on Austin City Limits one night and thought they sounded like they spent a lot of time listening to The Smiths - now I have a CD. Thank you, T.
You see, I tend to get sentimental over every piece of crap that enters the house. T will look at me and say: “You’re never going to throw that away, are you?” Probably not. It’s why I have become an advocate of use-up-able gifts. I like things that involve food or alcohol and can be consumed and be done with. Some toiletries can fall nicely into that category, too. And these are items that don’t necessarily require a trip to a mall.
I guess it’s because I don’t want to burden anyone with something they feel obligated to keep. I hold on to possessions and fret that one day, some poor soul with have to go through them all, and come across a black Afro wig and parts of a Halloween costume from years past and wonder why the hell I had squirreled it away instead of throwing it away. (That would be part of my Africanized Killah Bee costume. Trust me, it was much too ridiculous to be offensive.)
But I suspect that this will be a good shopping season. I know the media won’t spin it that way, but retailers will have a happy holiday. We might hear that sales are up at discount stores because people are so poor, so desperate, that all they can afford is Wal-Mart. I don’t shop there. Why? Because I can never find an open parking spot anywhere near the place. The super Wal-Mart near our house is always so crowded that a new one is opening soon just a few blocks away. We don’t eat out anymore - we stay home and cook - because every restaurant in town is jammed. Ruth’s Chris Steak House is looking at us because it’s one of the cities in America where people obviously don’t know how to cook. Our residents eat out - a lot. Doesn’t explain why the grocery stores are so crowded, but these folks are always at restaurants.
When we reach one million in population, Ruth’s Chris will invest here. And that should be happening very soon. We’ve been here almost eleven years and I don’t recognize the city anymore. The growth boggles my mind. So much construction! The economy is…well, very good for such a poor state.
But I listen to the news and read the paper and you’d think we were heading for an entirely different kind of Black Friday. Odd. Odd, indeed.
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