Black Friday USA

Thanksgiving was strange enough already. In the past 3 or 4 years, though, the idea of Black Friday has become one of those strange mass rituals that just develop out of nowhere.

The name comes from the fact that the Christmas shopping season puts most large retailers into the black most years. The stores always ran sales to get people off their well fed butts and into the mall on the day after Thanksgiving, but now it's reached a nearly religious fervor.

I can't believe the stuff I see on the news, which is of course trying to add to the mass weirdness to help their own corporate parents. It's as close to a holy pilgrimage as the US will ever have. By now it's just something people do. Get up at 3 AM and head for the mall, and go into debt for another year.

A few people have actually said that it's patriotic to do this.

There's a Buy Nothing Day on Black Friday too. It's been completely swamped in the waves of lemmingness, but it's there. They have a web site and everything.