Black Friday

With the so-called Black Friday sales con­clud­ed, I took the lib­er­ty to reflect a lit­tle on what it meant for the aver­age person. 

My first incli­na­tion was dis­dain, as a small busi­ness own­er I offer my cus­tomers a fair price all year round. I hate to hag­gle back and forth over prices, I have always believed it demeans me, demeans the cus­tomer and well,.…… my business.

So I looked at some of the peo­ple who own large cor­po­ra­tions, like Wal-Mart, Best ‑Buy, Sears, to name a few . These are peo­ple who are real­ly wealthy, mak­ing mon­ey is a game to them. A recent expose revealed that each of Sam Walton’s four chil­dren give to char­i­ty, the equiv­a­lence of a sin­gle pen­ny, when their wealth is com­pared to the Average American.

Why then would these peo­ple pay their work­ers min­i­mum wage salaries and run pho­ny sales which shop­pers can only access imme­di­ate­ly after they have swal­lowed the last bit of Thanksgiving Turkey ? Or worse yet, being made to stand in line at un-Godly hours of the night/​morning to get a price discount.

Where are these filthy rich own­ers at that time of the night/​morning while peo­ple are camped out wait­ing to be fed a bone?
Then I had a change of thinking.
What would hap­pen if these stores offered these deals and no one showed up to their stores at 2:am in the morning?
Is it at all pos­si­ble that they would have to revert to respect­ing their customers ?

How can the major­i­ty 99% allows itself to be manip­u­lat­ed in this way ?
Then it occurred to me that they basi­cal­ly get some of us to vote against our own self- inter­est among oth­er things, so why not insult us with these false sales attain­able only in the dead of night and at great per­il to life and limb.
If we are stu­pid enough to leave our fam­i­lies to stand in line in the dead of night to save a few bucks then maybe we deserve the dis­dain and dis­re­spect their mar­ket research sug­gest they heap on us.

I would guess that the wealthy 1% and their fam­i­lies were com­fort­ably tucked away in warm beds at the time these peo­ple are wait­ing patient­ly in sub zero tem­per­a­tures or fight­ing with their fel­low cit­i­zens over some­thing as triv­ial as a piece of garment.

Despite my dis­gust on Friday one woman actu­al­ly made my day . She was my first cus­tomer, she walked in and want­ed to know about the deals my busi­ness had for black Friday.
I lov­ing­ly told her I respect­ed her too much to play num­bers games with her. We had a good laugh, then she told me she had vis­it­ed and seen a phone which she want­ed . The price in my store was $189.00 so she admit­ted that she was on QVC shop­ping and the price of the phone was $189.00 for a few hours, after which the price went back to .….…
Wait for it.….….
$279.00, wow !
She asked to pur­chase the phone.
I thanked her for her hon­esty and gave her an extra $20 off.

I do agree that as a small busi­ness own­er I am biased against the large box stores. Nothing that I said how­ev­er is meant to be inju­ri­ous, they are just fac­tu­al statements.
It’s time that we the 99% stop allow­ing the 1% to manip­u­late us like string puppets.