Black Friday is the day after Thanksgiving. It’s not a bad day, like Black Monday, or a bad thing, like Black Bart.
Black Friday is the day which marks the start of profits for retail stores. They’ve led everyone to believe they’re in the red and don’t make money from January through Thanksgiving, so they hold huge sales for the month before Christmas to make their annual profits, and go into the black.
I don’t buy that.
What I will buy is that Black Friday has become an insane effort by shoppers to save money on products that are probably already overpriced, then discounted. Insane? Yes. There was no parking available at Ala Moana Center very early Black Friday morning.
Worse, some family members trekked to Waikele Shopping Center before midnight on Thanksgiving to get in on the very early morning Black Friday sales. Uh oh. No parking. They spent 90-minutes sitting along H-1 which became a huge off ramp for the Waikele exit, and when they finally got into the shopping center there was no parking. I assume that Pearlridge Center was equally crowded. We didn’t bother to find out.
Instead, what we did was venture to the newly giant Safeway grocery store on Kapahulu Avenue, which opened to huge crowds a week or so earlier. We tried to get into the Safeway parking lot two days after it opened, but couldn’t find a parking space.
How was Safeway on Kapahulu on Black Friday? It wasn’t deja ju all over again. There were plenty of parking spaces, wide open aisles, and a few very intelligent shoppers, most of whom figured no one would be at Safeway because everyone else would be busy circling around the parking lots at Ala Moana Center, Waikele Center, and Pearlridge Center.
Grocery store shopping is best done the day after Thanksgiving.
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