Steve Ratigan and Danny Doherty
Staff Writers
Black Friday this year is going to be like any other black Friday, stampedes of people, irritated employees, and “Cheaper prices than ever.” Cheap prices, and ads all around to show these prices, have dropped. What some don’t know is that certain businesses take advantage of the oblivious consumers that stampede the store on the first Friday after Thanksgiving. These business sometimes lower prices even lower than they advertise weeks before Black Friday, just to make more profit from the oblivious customers. If you did solid research on certain items and knew the retail price, you could catch these sudden drops in prices weeks before the big sale event. The crowds, the fights, and the early stampedes can be proven to not be worth it on Black Friday, especially if the sales are lower in prior weeks to the event. Working and shopping on Black Friday can be a drag, but can be beneficial to the customer, as well as the employees. Higher pay and cheaper prices could never be a better day for a customer and an employee, but the environment of Black Friday can be too much for someone not used to the crowds. Some employees say: “You couldn’t pay me enough to work on Black Friday!”
Camping in freezing temperatures, dealing with stampedes and sometimes the bloody fight for the last item on the wall. Black Friday is an opportunity for people who love sales to get crazy about maybe getting a television for 50% that they do not even need. Black Friday in a sense has people saying, “I’d be losing money if I didn’t buy it.” With this comes massive amounts of people lined out stores, filling up streets, waiting for some of the biggest sales of the year in retail space to come out. Then again, they could wait until the next Monday when they could be sipping a hot cup of hot chocolate getting even better deals at home on their computer. But why would they? Why would they do that, when you can risk being trampled on and dying by electronically and home appliance hungry buyers? But for millions of Americans especially in a recovering economy like this, Black Friday has been the opportunity to not only get holiday gifts at a very low cost, but also a lot of the shopping for the year out of the way. There is a chance you could be run on and killed by thousands of insane individuals, but you also could be hit by a bus walking to the store. Black Friday every year brings commotion and madness, but in the end brings many families a financially easy holiday season. And really, what person does not love getting great deals, even if the stuff you are buying is not the most important. So this Black Friday, head up to Oxford Valley, Bridgewater, or King of Prussia and get the deals of the year on the items you love!
