The Black Friday Report

Your roving reporter J.A. Laraque has traveled across Miami, Florida to bring you this exclusive report on the phenomena known as Black Friday. For those of you who do not know what black Friday is, it is the day that everyone becomes a crazed early morning shopper, hunting for those earth shattering deals.

Ever laugh at the women who wake up at five in the morning to go shopping for a bed in a bag? When driving home from the bar and you see a line of pasty white, overweight teenagers camped outside of the video game store, do you laugh? If you said yes and believe this behavior is localized to those subspecies then you are wrong.

Have you even been to someone’s home who you know has an awful job and yet has an awesome fifty-one inch HDTV? Chances are if they did not steal it, they got it on black Friday. These bargain hunters will camp outside your local electronics store for up to ten hours to get that television half off. Normal men who would never be caught in a mall will load up their truck with beer and head out ready to do battle to get in, get the deal and get out.

Obscure-Internet asked me to report on this after Thanksgiving tradition, so, I went undercover and what I found was both mind numbing and sad.

I decided to go to a Best Buy. It is a super-chain electronics store. The store was not to open until six in the morning and I foolishly believed I could show up at five. I was horribly mistaken. The line was around the building twice. Stranger yet, I noticed everyone in line was extremely ugly. I had to assume for the sake of humanity that this was due to the ingestion of turkey coupled with the small amount of beauty sleep.

It was a cold morning, well cold for Miami. I expected to find mostly college kids and men over thirty-five who pretend they are twenty-five. What I found were people from every walk of life, but what saddened me the most (besides the ugly) was the number of mother’s there with their babies in the strollers.

I soon discovered that lack of sleep plus standing in line with strangers equals high tensions. There were several police cars parked in front of the store as several fights broke out. They were not bar fights, they were more like two nerds fighting over which anime was better. There were a lot of wild swings and breaks for these out of shape ultimate fighters to catch their breaths.

Black Friday participants have their own codes and ethics. One code I learned was that you do not cut in line and you do not hold spots for your friends. A young man, who I assumed was new to the Black Friday world, was kicked in the nuts when he tried to cut in front of a teenage girl. They called his punishment, the cunt punt, even though the young lady was actually very nice.

Best Buy had a ticket system. As they only had select products on special, there was a limit. They decided to hand out tickets with the name of the product, so, if you wanted that HDTV, you would get an HDTV ticket so you would not get beaten out by someone who is faster at running though the store. The biggest fight of the night occurred when it was discovered that the Best Buy representative was handing out fake tickets. He would tell people he had one left and make people bid for it. He made quite a few hundred dollars until someone figured it out. I saw him disappear in a sea of angry people and never heard from him again.

Once the doors finally opened the madness continued as hundreds of people poured into the store. It was a fire marshals nightmare as the store was completely packed. This would be a gropers dream except most of the boobs were on the men. I then realized why the mother’s brought their children in the strollers. The combination of kids and strollers made a great battering ram. They would use them to plow their way to what they wanted and when they slammed into you, all you could do was turn around, see the baby and then walk away depressed.

Many people also used their kids to try and get around the one per person per item rule. The cashier was not fooled as she knew an eight year old would not be able to purchase, much less carry, a forty-five inch HDTV.

All in all it was a sad night of people proving that when the zombie apocalypse comes we will need to trim a lot of fat from the human population before we rebuild our society. However, I did purchase a Nintendo Wii for fifty bucks. I do not plan to play it, just video tape myself beating it to death with a bat Office Space style.

I hate the Wii!

This is J.A. Laraque, reporting for Obscure-Internet news.

About J.A. Laraque