random thoughts – Day 1,718 – (Friday) – black friday memory

I was never a Black Friday shopper. Although invited by some serious shopper friends in the past, I never arrived at a store hours before opening to stand in a line in the dark waiting for the doors to open. My friends had strategies, with family members clutching pages from sales flyers and assigned the task of acquiring designated items. As fun (cough) as it sounded, I declined the offer to participate. For many years, I was safe from the hordes of shoppers, tucked safely at my desk working what was usually a very quiet day.

There have been stretches of my work life where I was employed in retail and participated in Black Friday from the other side of the sales counter. In 2015, I worked my last Black Friday retail sales event, but I didn’t know it at the time. And there’s always the chance I could end up in retail again, so maybe it wasn’t my last Black Friday after all. 

Thanks to the Facebook Memories feature, I was able to enjoy a Black Friday blast from the past of nine years ago. In 2015, I was the visual merchandiser at a national store. As the VM, I dressed the mannequins, hung the big signs on the walls and windows, hung displays from department ceilings and over the registers, put up the Christmas decorations, and set the metal sign fixtures on the racks and installed the sale signs. It involved a lot of trips up and down the big staircase in the stockroom and pushing a giant ladder across the tile floors. It was the kind of work with visible results each day and the work was physical enough that it served as a workout.

Black Friday memory, 2015.

That Black Friday of 2015 included prep time earlier in the week stuffing helium-filled metallic balloons into the training room where they would stay until it was time to set them on the store floor. Sign holders had been set in place with the signs displaying the backside. The Black Friday shift began at 12:30 a.m. on the morning of Black Friday, which gave the team 30 minutes to dash through the store and finish preparations before the doors opened at 1:00 a.m. for the line of people standing outside.

I was powered by caffeine as I raced around flipping the signs in the holders and checking the locations of the balloons that designated the locations of the extra special limited quantity Door Buster deals that enticed the shoppers to stand in the cold waiting for a store to open. The rest of the shift was spent directing customers to products and refolding clothes and tidying displays that became disheveled as people shop. It was exhausting.

Since leaving retail, on Black Friday, I usually avoid the stores. The exceptions have been the time I found myself at the Verizon store in the mall because I needed to replace a malfunctioning phone.  Another year, I accidentally booked an eye exam on Black Friday.  Today, I hunkered down at home. Except for changing the sheets, I and enjoyed a quiet day of nothingness. That is my favorite flavor of day lately.