Black Friday Consumes Thanksgiving

The logical thing to do after stuffing your face full of turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, and pumpkin pie is to hibernate for a good 10 plus hours or so. Somehow, in the last 20 years, retail businesses lured family away from their homes and into lines to get into their stores. 

Need an extra 15 percent off of a television you don't really need that badly? Eat dinner early and stand in Best Buy's line for five hours while waiting for them to open. Worse, once they open, you find out that they only had two of those televisions and you're now in a mad dash to beat eight other people to that television. Just remember...no one talks about fight club.

To compound the problem, brick and mortar stores are now whining about online stores drawing these customers away. At least with the online stores such as Amazon, you don't have to be pulled away from your family on holidays to save five dollars. I'm not saying that brick and mortar stores need to go away, but it is hard to feel sympathy for businesses that don't allow for people to spend the holidays with their family so they can make two percent more in their overall fourth quarter sales than they would have if they had just opened during normal hours on "Black Friday". 

Is employee morale really worth that two percent? When you consider higher turnover rates and being less attractive to new potential employees, two percent is nothing. Turnover and training cost a company more than two-percent. Reputation on how a company treats their employees causes them to lose potentially stellar recruits.

The problem with retail businesses today is that they rarely think in long-term parameters anymore. They'll gladly sacrifice a potentially long-term customer to make a few extra bucks today. This is why Black Friday turning into Black Thursday and ruining some family's Thanksgiving holidays has come about. Businesses are determined to steal that extra dollar from their competition by beating them to the sale.

But from the standpoint of the common person who doesn't work in retail, is Black Thursday really worth it? Yes, it may get you out of those awkward conversations about politics that you may find yourself in with your Uncle Buck after he's been able to down several beers. What about the positive experiences from family get-togethers? Days such as Thanksgiving give some kids their warm memories that they revere so much in their adult years.

This is not necessarily a rant against Black Friday. It's more of a call out to those who shop on Thursday evening to save a few extra dollars for something they probably didn't need anyways. Without you, the consumer, willing to sacrifice precious family time and memories, retail businesses wouldn't deem it necessary nor profitable to be open on a major holiday. Rather than unwittingly punching your child's gym teacher in the face to grab the last discounted Blu-Ray player, spend it with your family and purchase it on Black Friday or one of the other days that come before Christmas.

Internet Kills Experience of Retail For Today's Youth

Tower Records...photo credit on bottom

 

As technology advances, businesses fade away and the electronics that occupy teenagers changes constantly. When you reach adulthood and raise your own children, they grow up with electronic gadgets that make the devices of your generation look like they belong in "The Flintstones".

Now this may sound like only a problem for the older generations, but I disagree. One might say that the older generations get gypped because they didn't get to grow up with the technologies that the millennials are growing up with now. Many of these advancements make life easier, which older generations didn't get to utilize while they grew up. Especially when it came to entertainment media.

 The way I see it though, it's the youth of today that have been robbed. In a world of instant gratification, the current generation of kids have been robbed of experiences that we, the people of older generation, look back on fondly.

Today's youth can download a song, movie, or book instantly on various devices thanks to the internet, but for those of us who grew up in past decades, sometimes the search made obtaining the prize much more gratifying.

With the invention of software programs like iTunes, record stores began to fall, one by one. The experience of sifting through bins of records and cassettes (yes, not CD's) and finding the gem that you didn't even know existed, made the whole experience feel like it was worth it. Youth of older years would spend hours at record stores, share their music tastes with fellow kids, and often grow up with much more appreciation and ownership of the music artists they enjoyed.

Today, kids have been robbed of this experience. They can sit behind a computer or even a cellphone, pick a specific song they want, and never share the experience of sharing music with anyone beyond their social network. Even the corporate record stores such as Tower Records are gone. Beyond the random indie music store and the limited music selections that Target, Best Buy, and Walmart stores offer, there are no more brick and mortar locations to buy music in person.

The movie industry isn't fairing much better either. A victim of the same circumstances, many rental locations disappeared after a surge in the '90's. Similar to searching for a record in a music store, the experience of searching for a VHS tape on a weekend night has vanished. Searching shelf by shelf, glancing at past movies you never heard of, but had cool box covers, you give a random movie a shot because the description sounded like something you and your friends might enjoy. Now this experience is gone as well.

With technology like Blu-ray in existence, physical movie media is holding on just a little longer than the music industry is. Red Box locations have replaced Blockbuster Video stores, but soon may find themselves being purged when more people grasp onto services like Netflix, Hulu, and iTunes.

Best yet, is the reactions you get when today's youth gets their hands on old forms of media that existed before they were even born. Show a kid a LaserDisc and they'll look at you funny. Show a kid an 8-track and they'll have no idea what they're even holding. Vinyl records have a niche market out there thanks to club DJ's, but otherwise, many of the old forms of entertainment media has been lost on the youth.

Never again will a kid have to remember to rewind a video tape before returning it to the video rental store. Never again will a kid have to flip over a music cassette to hear the music on side two. And I doubt that ever again, will a kid holding a large boombox on his shoulders or over his head, a la John Cusack style, ever be something that the "cool" kids do again.

Tower Records photo uploaded by Caldorwards4 at Wikipedia.com