Black Friday Is Coming To Reign Death On Us All

By Daniel Dominguez on November 23rd, 2009

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Americans love shopping. They love it more than sex. They love it more than each other. I actually can’t get a hard-on with my wife unless I’ve made at least three impulse buys that day. We are a materialist nation. Where thousands of years ago a man would have taken up his spear and gone out on the long plain to stalk a Mastodon and wait, wait, wait for the right time to strike, spear it between the eyes so that it would die instantly and not crush the man under its thousands of deadly pounds, and then take its meat back to his family in his cave, he now drives eight minutes to the mall and buys a new duvet. Sure the duvet is great to snuggle under, but there’s something less satisfying about snuggling under a duvet than driving a spear through the skull of a Woolly Mammoth.

America has less than 25 percent of the world’s population, but we consume between 50 and 70 percent of the world’s resources, depending on the source of your information. Which is probably why we, on average, weigh just enough to scare a pack of coyotes. Though we are overweight, unsatisfied, and feel lots of bourgeois guilt about our shopping obsession, that has done nothing to mitigate our passion for it. In fact we are so passionate about shopping that we’ve started to KILL FOR IT.

Black Friday is a testament to that consumer culture. Black Friday is the unofficial “holiday,” the day after Thanksgiving that is exceptional because it is the busiest shopping day of the year. Last year on Black Friday a man was trampled to death at a Wal-Mart when customers rushed the doors of the store as it opened. Terrified, employees leapt onto vending machines to get out of the way of the unstoppable torrent of customers flooding the store. Yes, people got so excited about shopping on Black Friday that they ran over and crushed a human being. Then there was the fictional story that I made up right now where last year, on Black Friday, in a rush to get the last Build-A-Bear before they sold out, a six-year-old girl was stuffed with cotton and packaged and given back to her mother when an overworked store clerk accidentally hooked her up to the Build-A-Bear machine instead of the bear.

I actually think that Black Friday will probably be our undoing. Especially since each year more people are hurt and killed on that day (especially retail employees) and it only gets worse each year. In fact, it’s obvious that by the year 2025 we will all get so frenzied on Black Friday that there will be nothing left of America but a giant pile of millions of bodies, all of whose hands are outstretched towards the last Nintendo DS left at a Gamestop.