Hot-Flash: Menopause Barbie Flashes the World

Black (Friday) Sheep

‘Twas the day after T-day, and all through the land,
The people were shopping for every known brand.
Commercials that blared all week long on TV
And ads in the papers enticed them to see
Those deep-deep discounts and bargains they’d get
When the stores opened – while the dew was still wet,
At seven – no six! – no five! ‘neath parking lot lights.
You’d best get there early or camp overnight.
So, stuffed with turkey, potatoes and pies,
They hit Circuit City for great midnight buys.
By three in the morning, they must leave that store
To line up at Target or K-Mart by four.
Those discounters open at six o’clock sharp,
And only the early-birds get the big carts.
Employee shills (“We’re off work today.”)
Stand first in line, and have much to say:
“Only one set of the three sets of doors
Will be opened at six, so if you want to score
That TV or toaster or child’s rocking horse,
Get in line, keep your place, ‘cause the guards will enforce
The order in which all the shoppers arrive.”
Late-comers who “bump” just may not survive.
Weary waiters will turn upon late-sleeping fools
And call on the guards to enforce all the rules.
But if you’re compliant and stay in the line,
That pre-dawn bargain will make you feel fine.
Never mind that it costs the exact same at noon,
Or even next week. For you know that quite soon
The marketing masters, obeyed, let you sleep
’Til they herd you again like dumb, docile sheep.

I confess. I attempted shopping on Black Friday. I hadn’t shopped on the Friday after Thanksgiving for more than a decade. Completing all my holiday shopping before I eat the turkey is one of the things I’m always thankful for. I am oblivious to the onslaught of marketing that accosts us in every medium. Okay, not oblivious. I hate it. Actively. I cannot imagine many people succumbing to its blatant chicanery. I believed that the annual news coverage of dazed but earnest shoppers huddling in the cold at bizarre hours awaiting a store opening was vastly exaggerated by the media cynically serving the interests of its advertisers. Apparently my imagination was misinformed.

In the wee hours of this Black Friday, I did not set out to shop. I set out for a 7:00 AM cup of coffee with a nearby girlfriend at the local Panera. I knew there would be a Target on the way, and that it would have on sale a pragmatic little item I’d been meaning to get for myself – a small George Foreman grill. So I planned a little stop along the way to Panera. I arrived at 5:40, figuring I’d pop into Target at 6:00 when the store opened, after the (imagined) smallish clusters of very-early risers waiting at the three sets of doors made their well-deserved and too-long-awaited entrance. I would grab my little grill, and probably have to wait in a longish line to check out, and still be at Panera by 7:00.

Couldn’t do it. It wasn’t the long checkout line. I never got that far. I never got into the store. The problem – visceral terror at being in a herd of sheep as mindless as the people I found lined up outside.

Snapshot: One long line, a queue of some 200 people (when I arrived, but it grew as I watched) all leading to one single set of doors. This was dehumanizing crowd-control reminiscent of Disney theme parks without the roped-off switch-back model, which would at least have allowed people to huddle for warmth. In light of last year’s stories of violence against line-jumpers, though, maybe it was simply prudent management.

I never meant to stand in line. I brought a banana and a bottle of water, which I planned to enjoy while sitting in my car until the long-waiting crowd entered. But the vision of the extreme conga line made me curious. The weather was not too cold, so I strolled the line with my banana and my bottle, chatting with folks. Big mistake.

First, I tossed my banana peel in the nearest trash can, which happened to be by the only set of doors from which the line of shoppers snaked out into the wilds of the parking lot. There, as I was strolling away (away from the trash can and away from the sacred door to the temple of Mammon), I was verbally accosted by the (“off-duty”) employees who had been in line since 4:00 AM to nail their bargains. They directed me pointedly to the end of the line. “Yeh, yeh, thanks, I get it. What’d you want me to do? Toss the peel on the ground here where y’all would slip on it?”

On my meander along the line, I noticed the happily chatting groups of people who’d been waiting who-knew-how-long, and whose feet must be hurting. I thought, gee, this is so sweet – people getting along, talking with strangers sharing an experience, with a common goal. There’s something innocently intimate about queueing up with strangers in the dark of very early morning.

I asked one lone, petite woman near the front of the line how long she’d been there. Oh, only about 20 minutes, she said. She had asked the employees at the very front what the deal was with the line going to only one door when there were three – two at opposite ends of the front of the building, and one at the side by the garden department. She wasn’t exactly in the line, more of an out-lier like me, but she wasn’t walking away from the line, either. I asked her what she was going to do. “I’ll wait ‘til they’re all in before I go in. I only want a couple of things I can carry in my arms. Don’t need a cart.” I wished her “happy shopping” and wandered on along the line, eavesdropping on conversations.

Most people were telling each other what they were hoping to buy. No surprises – toys for kids, clothes, home appliances. Nobody else mentioned my small grill. That gave me confidence. Who gives a two-burger grill for Christmas?

Then I started asking people how early they’d arrived – 4:30 AM, to be about 50 people back in the line – and why they did that. I mean, Black Friday is infamous for being frustrating to shop in, dangerous to drive in, and not particularly bargain-rich compared to prices that would be offered during the weeks before Christmas.

One well-dressed, merry-faced woman’s response typified the mentality: “Oh, just for the excitement.” Okey-dokey, then. I just could not bring myself to ask her how excited she felt after standing in the cold and dark for an hour and a half. It’s one thing to be all Snidely Whiplash when I write about these sheeple, but I simply could be the Grinch who stole her Christmas right in her face. So I wished her a happy holiday as I noted the slightly unfocused eyes that looked back into mine. Not glazed, exactly, but definitely not focused on present reality. She must have been listening to some very exciting voices in her head where the exciting images were cavorting, in a state of shopping frenzy and glee.

An altered state. That’s what I observed in the rest of the folks I chatted with, once I knew what I was looking at. Oh, they weren’t all in the same state, but they weren’t in the here and now, being who they usually are. No. I wouldn’t call it a state of excitement, but it was some state of fantasy.

There was a recently retired man in a windbreaker and shorts and tennis shoes, directing the latest-arriving stragglers to the (ever farther) end of the line. “End of the line’s over there,” he shouted, flinging his arm in the right direction, “You have to go to the end.” I asked him if he was an employee with an official role this morning. No, “I just like doing it.” Maybe he’d been a policeman, and enjoyed directing traffic when the stop-lights were out. With these folks, the lights were definitely out.

As I passed him, the petite woman who had been hanging out not-quite-in-line near the door caught up with me. “The employees called the security guard on me,” she reported. “They pointed me out. The guard towered up over me and told me to go to the end of the line. I wasn’t going to go in until everybody in line had gone in, I just didn’t want to walk all the way out there just to walk all the way back to the door.” And, shaking her head, off she went to the very end of the line.

As I worked my way farther and farther into the more recent arrivals, people who had been standing an hour or less, I found less conversation and more glazed eyes. They were definitely “in line” physically, but their brains stared out of their eyes into the middle distance – maybe seeking the brightness of the parking lot lights to keep themselves awake. I’ll never know. Their auto-pilot demeanor forbade interruption; one does not want to startle the living dead.

Among the very latest arrivals, there was some spark of active cognition. These folks seemed less amused to be stuck far back in a single line, but figured they were there, might as well stay and get what they came for. They were resigned to the situation, but at least they could verbalize what it was.

Then I looked from the end all the way along the line to the front. I remembered that I’d just driven by a pasture where the cattle were stirring, about to start their grassy breakfast, seeking exactly what they needed precisely when they needed it. No ads could persuade them to do otherwise. These cattle wouldn’t be herded until the slaughter, but they would have no previous experience of that hazard to advise them of the danger – no freezing throngs immortalized on film during last season’s final march to the killing ground. The herd I was looking at in the Target parking lot had no such excuse.

Not that retail marketing would kill them, except, from what I’d observed, spiritually. Just shear them seasonally. Desensitize and deaden them bit by bit. So my herd wasn’t cattle, but sheep – marginally aware, but not really thinking beasts. Not oblivious to the ploys convincing them of this “excitement,” but acquiescing to it. Who knew what this herd might do if prodded just so – unthinking, innocent, but stampeding with sharp hooves all the same.

Not a crowd I wanted to share a store with. This is Florida, after all – a state with its own category of weirdness on Fark.com, where the Florida category has more entries than the “dumbass” category. I didn’t want my friends and relatives seeing me among the terrified (or deceased) in the morning news coverage of a “45-calibre stand-off among over-excited shoppers at SuperTarget.” That’s not my idea of excitement.

I finished my water walking back to my car. It was 5:55. I arrived early at Panera, and had a cup of coffee before my friend arrived. I read the paper – mercifully uncluttered by the previous few days’ volume of ads. No need, today. The sheep were already in the shearing sheds. Baaa! Or, as Scrooge and I would say, “Bah!”

© Kate Diamond 2006

posted by Kate Diamond @ 5:57 PM