2129 Gray Assault

Christmas Season is here, and with it the frenzy foisted upon us by herds of anxious shoppers. The people that are most motivated by the phrase "don't miss out."

This year many of the large retailers are, according to them, altruistically relieving the crunch of Black Friday shopping by opening on Thanksgiving Thursday. Well, thanks to them.

Thanks for creating the Black Friday frenzy in the first place. Thanks for inventing the term "doorbuster," only to see it actually come true as hysterically amped-up shoppers, having waited in the cold for hours for ridiculously low prices on two items, actually bust down doors in their mad dash to a discount, sometimes killing folks in the stampede.

The great Darwinian shopping extinctifier. Shop now while natural selection is best. Only the fittest survive...

So now, the doorbusters are being pushed back to 8:00 on Thanksgiving night. Or even 6:00 in some places. I'm sure next year it will be 4:00, then 2:00, then what the hey, really really early Thanksgiving morning, before the family sits down to turkey later that day. Stuffing their shopping bags before they stuff their bird. 

Sad, because retailers don't seem to get that the biggest thing that makes Black Friday work is anticipation, the suspense and delayed gratification created by the break of Thanksgiving. Encroach on that and it disappears faster than beer goggle beauty.

Besides, it's spending all day with your relatives on Thanksgiving that makes some folks want to get out early and shop in the first place.  Why be home with family when you can join a crowd of strangers in the cold and damp and bust down doors? 

A tough question. Morally it's not a black and white issue. Perhaps that's why some retailers are calling it Gray Thursday.

America, ya gotta love it.