12:42 AM, Troutlet Outlet Mall, Troutdale, Oregon – Coast to Coast Am is on the radio here in EPB’s remote newsroom as it is every Black Friday when I’m writing up our coverage of the year’s busiest shopping night. Tonight’s topic is the impending end of time at the end of the Mayan calendar on December 21, 2012. Tonight’s guest, Drunvalo Melchizedek (A high priest after the order of Melchizedek? I don’t think so.) seems to be saying that the world won’t end abruptly on the 21st of next month. There will be calamities to eventually follow that date, but there will also be positive events as well. Part of the calamities will have to do with a magnetic pole shift which will take place some time, perhaps years, after 12/21/2012. (As I type this out, I’m wondering, why 12/21/2012 and not 12/12/12, a date which would be so much more symmetrical than any other date. I may have hit on something. Maybe the world will indeed end next month and in fact it may end nine days earlier than the end of the Mayan calendar.) As always, George Noory is my only friend.
As for the shopping scene tonight, it is OVERWHELMING. This is my eighth or ninth Black Friday and my third covering it for East Portland Blog. This year there’s obvious growth in the popularity of the event. Stores are now full of shoppers enjoying themselves after having spent early Thursday with family. For many the Thursday night and early part of Friday morning post-Thankgiving shopping has become part of their familial tradition in itself, with entire families heading out to wait on line for such things as Walmart electronics and regaling each other with tales of previous years’ Black Friday bargains and the waits necessary to obtain them. By Thursday evening, people want to get out of the house and every year malls are filling fuller with T-giving celebrants looking for something, anything to do outside the house.
We began the late afternoon/evening with a delicious Turkey dinner at the local Village Inn. We then headed to Walmart to peruse the sales literature and formulate a strategy. Skies above the parking lot at 82nd near Holgate remained clear and dry all night. There was a brisk chill in the air, definitely football weather even as the football year is ending. The lack of precipitation had to increase turnout this year.
On the fringe of the parking lot a sad protest featured 50 or 60 disgruntled participants gathered around a stationary sign decorated with Christmas lights which said, “Walkout on Walmart.” The protestors didn’t seem to realize how popular these early markdowns are, both with shoppers and with workers in desperate need of overtime pay. Part of the reason for the protest was to get Walmart to allow employees to spend the entire Thanksgiving day and night with family. Nice enough idea, but the protest has only made certain that both the families of Walmart workers and the families of sympatico Walmart protestors are without their treasured and most conscientious members on this holiday.
This year I was involved more in the “ground game” of making specific Walmart purchases than I was in prior years. This year my wife needed me to act as a placeholder in various lines for various items she wanted to purchase for her family. Thus I waited in line three and a half hours for a discounted lap top, craving a book or a cup of coffee for every minute of that wait. Us laptop waiters were shoehorned into a line in the RV accessories aisle. I waited among chemical septic stuff and other RV toilet supplies. The wait was successful, ultimately, the laptop is ours and soon to be gifted, but I missed hours of valuable time which could have been used to observe the crowds, report on the action and get comments from determined shoppers as I have done in recent years (here’s coverage from 2011 and 2010.)
During that time I made three Facebook updates from my phone which chronicle my three hour descent from Wal-optimism to Wal-fear to Wal-revulsion. Around 7pm, still giddy with tryptophan and memories of mashed potatoes, I posted this:
“Walmart teems with pleasure-expectant shoppers, all carefully polite and clearly flummoxed at the prospect of discounted electronics.”
To be fair, this was generally true. Most of the line-standers were teenagers, sometimes younger kids, but they were all generally respectful of public order. They were often the fluent English-speaking children of discount-seeking parents born overseas and uncertain of their own English skills. Often Mama and Papa would place their several children one each in different lines for different bargains, then come back periodically throughout the night for updates from the kids, always respectfully delivered from child to parent in the parents’ native tongue.
Yet at 8pm, this was my update:
“Veneer of Walmart shopper politeness scraping off as Black Thursday witching hour approaches.”
And this too, was quite true. By eight pm, arguments were heard, older line-standers like me began to complain, the store itself had become packed and stuffy. The situation was deteriorating. My phone battery was running low.
Finally, at 9pm, with an hour to go before we would be awarded our long-awaited laptops, I updated Facebook unto this wise:
“Madhouse madhouse madhouse stay away from Walmart.”
I didn’t need punctuation any more. Frustration was high. Crowds were thick. Despite having waited two and a half hours already, I still had an hour to go. I didn’t believe I could make it.
Luck came in the form of a foldable RV patio mat. I saw it on the shelf, and without unfolding the mat or disturbing the packaging, I placed it on the floor and laid down upon it. A pregnant woman from Colombia saw my idea and did the same for herself, as did some of the bilingual children. When the Walmart staffers didn’t object, and why should they, we weren’t hurting the merchandise, we settled in for the last hour of waiting and eventually triumphed. I was of course elated when ten pm rolled around and I was given my ticket to purchase the laptop. According to pre-arranged plan, I scurried to the far checkout lanes and caught up with my lovely wife just as she was about to make her purchases, thus my checkout line wait was mercifully short. Few others were quite so fortunate. Many had to follow their three hour line wait for an item ticket with a half hour checkout line wait to pay for said item. After paying, we took our ticket around to the “large item pick up” door, handed the ticket to a no-nonsense off-duty policeman, who wasted no time or words in handing us our laptop and visually inspecting the vehicle for contraband, and we were on our way.
The most obvious takeaway from this year is that Black Thursday has now gone mainstream. Most stores are now open on Thanksgiving day, at least in the evening. The former ritual of having to wait out in the cold for a 5am Friday opening is gone forever. Walmart reformed their practices after someone was trampled to death a few years back. Therefore, it’s not Black Friday anymore, in the last two years the holiday has become Black Thursday. Retailers are selling enough on Thanksgiving Day itself to rebound themselves into the fiscal black hours before the sixth day of the week dawns. For instance, our entire Walmart booty, as well as the frantically acquired largesses of tens of thousands of other Portlanders, were all purchased by 10:15 pm Thursday.
After that we were off to the packed Troutdale Outlet Mall, “The Troutlet,” which had every parking spot full and lots of parking seekers circling the lot in their cars and waiting for someone to leave and vacate a space. The Dickensian-themed carolers were back this year and in finer form than ever. “Why lies He in such mean estate?” they asked me in song. I had no answer. Every store was open, including the Christian book store and the uniform store which only sells medical scrubs. (My wife got a deal on some scrubs.)
She had the most fun, and perhaps got the best bargains of the night, at Gateway Mall Kohl’s, our last stop of the night/morning. Opening at midnight, there were still plenty of discounted clothes, towels and bedsheets to be devoured when she arrived around one. She rocked the discounts inside while I struggled to stay awake in the car typing this report. Eventually I had to give up this screed and surrender to a nap. At 2:30 am, flush with the satisfaction of extensive white sale values, my lovely wife returned to the car, awakened me, and we went home, much earlier than usual, yet having scored better deals than in previous years.
