Have you ever braved the black Friday day after Thanksgiving crowds to Christmas shop? We've gone for the last several years and had realitively little trouble until last night or was it this morning???? The trick is to Power Shop. You have a list of what you need/want, go into the store, grab it and get in line, pay for it and get out of the store before you're trapped in an endless line.
We decided to get an advance jump on it by going to the Midnight Madness sale at Value City Department Store. The madness was this...the lack of organization drove the rest of us crazy. There weren't enough cashiers, there were no announcements that such and such a line had less waiting, and no easy access to the front of the store where the registers were. There were no employees on the floor for crowd control or to keep the lines moving.
Added to the confusion were the rednecks and hoosiers (I apologize to the good folks of Indiana-I'm using the term hoosier for words I don't usually use in this blog) that were in line in front of us. I joke alot about rednecks but I have never seen so many redneck hoosiers in one place at one time who weren't drinking. Their behavior was driving the rest of us to drink or at least we had the yearning for alcoholic oblivion.
They scooped up a cartful of stuff and argued with the cashier about each and every purchase. I don't like to be cheated but you cut everybody some slack on a Sale event. You deal with the problems the next day unless it was a big ticket item. They were also loudly demanding subtotals before unloading the cart fully and several people were checking out of one cart.
Did you know there are oriental rednecks? The kicker or last straw for us was an oriental gentleman (?) who was arguing over towels that rang up not at $2.99 but at $3.99. Here again it wouldn't have bothered me so much if he had been buying 10, 15, etc but he had two towels. I almost handed him two bucks to get him to shut up. About the time, the manager arrived and directed people over to some other registers. We checked out after having been in line for two long hours.....but our shopping is done despite the rednecks. (BTW, I acknowledge that we were insane or at least delusional by not leaving when we saw the line. My only excuse, in years past we've experience long lines but the cashiers were efficient, there were more of them, and most importantly the management kept things flowing with excellent crowd control)
To survive such an ordeal, I visualized what their redneck Christmas might be like. These are some of the possible images:
