Americans Win Black Friday Contest With Billion-Dollar Buying Orgy
Congratulations, everybody: Black Friday retail sales topped a billion dollars, which means everybody is rich and happy again. Whether shopping from a laptop in bed with a variety of empty bottles and pie crumbs or “at the actual store” with your fellow shoppers in their sweatpants, you helped make America great again.
How much greater? How about 26% better than Black Friday 2011! That is just a phenomenal amount of spending, for a phenomenal amount of consumer goods, electronics, gifts, and whatever else people buy. Pretty much everything is a Black Friday sales item in 2012. Cars? Oh hell yeah, go buy a car on Black Friday. Vibrators? Of course. Anything you might buy, for yourself or anyone else, counts as a Black Friday Christmas Holiday Gift. Thanksgiving Day online shopping was up 36% over 2011, as millions of people realized it’s now socially acceptable to leave the idiot family arguing about global warming for some “Christmas shopping,” alone.
There were incidents, of course. There are always incidents. When you get a couple hundred million people riled up into an old-fashioned frenzied mob, things happen. Children are left in cars and parents are arrested. Fistfights break out, and sometimes even the Walmart workers launch small revolts. There are must-haves, and great temporary sadness for those who cannot get the must-haves, even though the must-haves will probably be available again in a few days, without wrestling a lot of angry people.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDpAkjD3wXo
Are these mini-riots a hint of things to come? Of the social unrest that will finally break this country apart? Maybe! Or maybe not, maybe it’s just the closest thing most people get to “being a part of the community” in our current era. It’s good to get out of the house and beat the crap out of strangers once a year. Takes the edge off. There is probably a good research study to be done, by some researchers, that proves people who get to wrasslin’ over an iPad Mini are less likely to … strangle their children? Dress up like The Joker and shoot up a movie theater full of random people? New research will most likely suggest that having public rituals of minor violence such as Black Friday or the Hunger Games or Death Race 2000 or the Giants winning the World Series give people a reason to get nuts and smash stuff so they don’t kill their families. Science can prove this, we bet!
Congratulations to the American Consumer for once again winning the award. Come back next year, if there’s a next year. Anyway, what did you buy, or not buy, over this long weekend? Tell us in the comments, and make your country proud.
Picture via @AdamNMayer.