Post-prandial stompin'

So Thanksgiving doesn't seem like the likeliest holiday to go with shopping at 5 a.m. the next day, what with the massive consumption of (if you were at the home I was at for TG) turkey, wine, roasted yams, cranberry relish, caviar, capicola, shrimp cocktail, pumpkin cake (in a roll, with cream cheese frosting), pumpkin pie, green beans, oyster stuffing and lots of yummy appetizers. It seems like a morning spent sleeping in is the best remedy.

However, there are apparently a lot of people who enjoy getting up early and heading to the local big box store to wait for an early opening to buy specially discounted electronic (and sundry) goods.

I'm beginning to wonder if these one-time-only discounts aren't for more than just attracting consumers, because apparently consumers just want to shop early on Black Friday anyway. I'm beginning to wonder if these deals are meant to inspire good security camera material for the overlords' Christmas parties.

Think about it.

Who do the Wal-Marts of the world hire? Poor, unsophisticated people. What do they do to them while they work there? They strip them of their human dignity and make them put their kids on state health insurance programs. Why do they do it? There's profit to be made.

But something happened on this side of teaching them to sing the company song and do the butt wiggle at the center dash of Wal-Mart. There became a cruelty in the degredation; a pleasure in being telling a woman worker they didn't have to pay for time she spent in the bathroom.

I can just imagine some corporate man of industry telling his cronies, "I'm sure the $30 DVD players will attract the masses to shop ... but let's only stock a few so we can watch the fur fly." Because who buys $30 DVD players because of a marketing circular? Poor, unsophisticated people (and me, but I got mine in the off-season with no lost dignity). It's like two jolly-makers in one.

I bet there is not a person reading this post that didn't watch their local news in some state of horror over the crowds at the big boxes, and the commotions that were caused by the "deals" inside. Or that didn't see some permutation of the 73-y-o grandmother whose leg was broken in the crush to get a cheap laptop computer story in their local paper.

You can say the stampeders were acting like animals, and you wouldn't be half wrong, but there's something wrong with a world that sets up conditions for people to feel crazed and greedy like that. And if it seems crazy that something like this exists in America, well, I sure feel that way.