This was Black Friday?
Just like the proverbial Old Gray Mare, it apparently ain’t what it used to be.
When I was working as a business reporter earlier in the century, I was out before dawn on the morning after Thanksgiving, watching massive crowds battle for bargains.
In some parts of the country, would-be shoppers were trampled and injured, a few of them even killed.
Today was my 12th Black Friday living in Georgia, although there were a couple of them when we weren’t here. Even so, being retired, I have avoided going anywhere near crowds of shoppers … until this year.
I wouldn’t have gone out at all, except that my lovely wife said we needed a few more things to finish the packages we would be sending to Tunisia and Virginia. With supply-chain problems and slower postal deliveries, there was a sense of urgency about it.
I essentially had three stops to make, and the first of them was easy. Office Depot was all but empty and I was able to get four of the six gift cards I needed with very little effort.
The next stop was more problematic, or at least I thought it would be. I needed to stop at Walmart to pick up a couple of video games for one of my grandsons. In the early days of Black Friday, Walmart was pretty much the ninth circle of hell. There wewre years in California when I witnessed 1,500 people or so in line for 6 a.m. openings and competition for a lot fewer than 1,500 wonderful bargains.
But at 9 a.m. this year, the parking lot was half empty and the store was less busy than a regular afternoon or evening. In fact, there were some parts of the store that seemed almost deserted.
Electronics — the part of the store that included video games among other delights — was a little more crowded, but I was still in and out with my purchase as if it were an ordinary day.
Two stops down, one to go.
The last one was going to be somewhat hellish, no matter what. I needed to get gift cards from a store with only two locations in the Atlanta area, both of them more than 50 miles away. Ironically, the two locations were in upscale malls within seven or eight miles of each other.
I left at 10 a.m. and headed for Lenox Square Mall in north Atlanta. Traffic wasn’t bad and I got there in about an hour. The first pleasant surprise was that it wasn’t at all difficult to park, and I was out of the car and into the mall quickly. It looked more like a busy shopping day inside, but I found the store, got the last two gift cards I needed and was on the way back home in less than. an hour.
Once again, traffic was surprisingly light and I was home in less than three hours when I had been figuring on four.
I was done by 1 p.m., and even though I felt tired, it was more from driving more than a hundred miles than any particular difficult effort.
We’ll get our packages into the mail and hope the gifts make our family members happy. If there’s one thing about it that makes me sad, it’s that we won’t be near any of them when they open the gifts. Actually celebrating Christmas morning in our home is a thing of the past Since moving to Georgia in November 2010, I think we’ve put up our tree once.
Just like Black Friday isn’t what it once was, neither is Christmas for us.
Oh well.
We still have the pleasure of giving.