Today is Black Friday.
Given that Thanksgiving is usually about a month before Christmas, it becomes the start of the holiday shopping season. Since Thursday is a holiday for almost everybody, and most people have Friday off too, although technically is a workday, all stores are open, and it's become the day when everybody goes shopping. On my first year in America, I thought naively: "hey, today it's a workday, so stores will be open." So I went and I found the whole city in the mall where you couldn't even walk.
Why the name Black Friday is not clear. Wikipedia has two versions: first, that traffic cops in Philadelphia coined the word because of the traffic nightmare of that Friday; and second, that businesses had so much volume that day that they went from red numbers (loss) to black ones (profit). Be as it may, it is one of the days with most commercial activity of the year.
American stores offer great discounts today, many times to the early birds.Stores open at 5, or even at midnight. It's crazy. There are people who stand on a line in the November cold to save $100 on a laptop, for instance. It's ridiculous. One more example of American consumerism.
My friends Truman and Ripleyz mention in their blog an initiative by the three or four people who hate Black Friday, called Buy Nothing Day, where they urge people not to buy anything today. It was inconvenient for me to go shopping today, because I was on the train back from the lake, and later I stayed home to catch up with things (and I also wanted to avoid the crowds), but I didn't want them to think I was on their side, so I made an online purchase :-) Because hey, if you don't want to buy anything, fine, but why go against those of us who love going shopping? Leave us alone.
