What Black Friday Doesn’t Teach You

[This post originally appeared on my xanga on November 24th, 2oo6. It is here for reflection reasons. To view the original entry, click here.]

I find it amazing that two days out of the year, people in America are willing to get up before the crack of dawn, stand in forty degree weather with others, and fight over consumer electronics, clothing, and other miscellaneous accessories, all at a tremendous discount, then spend another thirty minutes to two hours standing in line. Like the principles of economics state, if you give people an incentive to do something, they will most likely jump at it.

So like a huge fraction of the people in America today, I got out of bed at 4 am this morning on three hours sleep and decided to trudge over with my mother, to the Circuit City off of highway 85 at the Costco at Almaden Expressway. The line was long, and curved around the building and down towards the Men’s Wearhouse. It was absolutely maddening inside, with lines curving around aisles once, twice and in some cases, three times. I think I spent what felt like an eternity in there, which was really more like an hour and a half. But yeah, if I’m the manager, I think I’m sitting in my black leather chair this afternoon and counting all the dollars I received.

In the greater scheme of things though, in such a materialistic world, it’s kind of funny how we count our blessings one day, and then the very next, we’re counting how much we’ve bought. We judge people by the amount they have in their pockets sometimes, and not in their hearts. I’m all for a DVD player for $20, but sometimes, I just wish I could drop it all and leave it all behind and just go sit in the creek and enjoy what’s already there. We seem to always talk about living a simple life with the so-called simple pleasures, but how many of us really do it?

I was thinking this at a Safeway later, when I saw this elderly man purchasing a bouquet of flowers, perhaps for a wife, sibling or friend. He glanced over at me while as I was putting what my mom and I had bought on the counter, and as we changed to a different cash register, it made some more sense, that in this world, we could probably lose everything we’ve ever had, and all our material possessions

But in the end, we still have each other.

Maybe this ‘holiday’ is good for something after all.

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