The Dark Side of Black Friday

In my last post I commented on my most recent Black Friday experience and why I like this retail bonaza. This post, as promised, will discuss a few things that I don’t like about Black Friday.

I guess it comes down to just a few basic things.

More. It’s not just an issue with Black Friday, but year round, and that is the feeling that we need more stuff. What’s worse is that we are constantly being told that we deserve more stuff. “You deserve a ______________.” Plasma screen TV, new iphone, car, wardrobe, etc. But when you witness the sheer volume of stuff that’s being purchased on this one day is disturbing and causes one to consider how gluttonous our society really is.

Goodwill toward Men. While it can be entertaining to watch people and laugh at the childish manner in which people behave on Black Friday, there really isn’t anything funny about people treating other people as badly as they do. Watch the news and you’ll hear about someone that was trampled by a crowd or a fight that broke out on Black Friday. Sad really.

The Newspaper. I don’t like it that the Thanksgiving Day newspaper is stuffed full of the retail store “door buster” advertisements. A few years back, we spent Thanksgiving with my wife’s side of the family. When we got to her grandmother’s house, many of them were just sitting around the table looking through the ads and planning where they would go the following day. I couldn’t believe it, these are people that don’t visit or see each other very often and rather than enjoy that time together, they were planning and deciding what stuff they were going to buy the next morning. Fortunately, that hasn’t been the case in recent years, but still, I think that such an occurrence may be more common than we think.

So, those are the big three, but they all really just boil down to old fashion selfishness. My good friend Travis Keller says that Black Friday is the day that makes baby Jesus cry.
The truth is our selfishness, is a problem year round. Perhaps Black Friday isn’t the day we make baby Jesus cry, maybe it’s just the day when our selfishness is so in our face that we finally notice He’s there in the first place. And yes, He’s probably crying.