Black Friday bonding

Friend of Murketing John Sellers, apparently on holiday in Michigan, posts this:

In other news, I survived Black Friday. I’m not sure if Black Friday is the same in other parts of the country, but here in G.R. there is folly, folly everywhere. It was reported that more than 2,000 people were waiting outside the Best Buy here before it opened yesterday morning at 5 a.m., and that dozens of them had been in line since the previous afternoon. In temperatures that dipped below the freezing point.

From The Grand Rapids Press:

S—-r B———x, 31, of Lake Odessa, joined the line at 3:30 p.m. Thursday to get her hands on a Sony laptop, case and printer half-price at $499.99. Her 13 1/2-hour wait was ameliorated by the kindness of strangers in line who shared their tent and heater.

“It was just to be able to get the laptops and be with everybody, and we made some new friends,” B———x said.

Mr. Sellers concludes: “I just don’t understand this country anymore.”

The local news here in Savannah featured very similar reports. I listened in amazement to a guy who showed up with his family at 3 p.m. on Thanksgiving day to wait in the Best Buy parking lot for the store to open the next morning. He was something like 25th in line.

He said he enjoyed it, did the same thing last year — that it’s a great way to spend a lot of time with his kids, away from the TV and the Internet. (Earlier he’d mentioned that they were actually hoping to buy some more computers on special.)

A subsequent report on Saturday shopping included an interview with a man who said he and his family had spent 12 or 13 hours in the mall on Friday, and figured Saturday’s expedition would go another 10 hours or so.

Certainly this is all better than last year’s retail mayhem. But it is a little confusing. Is a big box parking lot the best place we have left for family bonding? And how does one go about finding a way to burn 20+ hours in a mall? I don’t think I could do that on a bet. Given all the gloomy economic news, you’d think shoppers would be approaching the season with grim determination, not upbeat tales of making new friends with fellow consumers.

Maybe what this is what Black Friday is really all about now, one of the last occasions for public gathering in a fragmented era, doing the one thing that unites the American masses — shopping as a way to, as the Grand Rapids shopper quoted above put it, “be with everybody.”