Blackest Day

November 25th, 2022 marked my seventh Black Friday as a retail worker, specifically in the electronics department.

You would think after so many years you would just know what do to. How to handle the swarm of people coming into a store with wild eyes ready to drop absurd amounts of money. The rush of transactions right before your very eyes. The call-outs of coworkers, and the hope that the ones beside you can hold on.

It’s like a strange ritual. The so called “Black Friday Deals” have been going on since September. Companies have no shame for showing their hand too early: they know that people are going to want the best price, regardless of when they do it. If they manage to catch someone in September or even on the day of Black Friday— it’s still a sale.

The Land of Red and Khaki (which will remain named as such, for plausable deniability), was no different. Upon store open, which I had been there already for two hours, dreading the inevitable, I was accosted by a woman about an Easy Bake Oven. We haven’t sold Easy Bake Ovens at this location in two years. We do not spontaneously rip them from the unknowing void that is the backroom. Easily enough she didn’t like that answer and stormed off, and I was forcibly dragged into fetching smart devices left and right while my coworker was drafted into handling the television sales. I didn’t pity him— we sold most of them earlier in the week with the early deals no one cares to notice until it’s too late.

I had never been raised on the thrill of going out Black Friday morning and hunting out deals, so the notion already is absurd. And looking at it from a worker’s perspective: it‘s the source of our burnout as companies put a greater pressure on us to meet deadlines, particularly with the expectation that COVID-19 brought on profit margins. Companies have overbought on stock, and where people were able to come clean from pushing a truck and make it presentable for the shoppers (and clean up their following mess). Now, one thousand units became two thousand, with less hours, with a contrasting back and forth of powers. The vacancies left on the entry level ricochet up to the very top, where high-end store managers earning six-figures, stock bonuses, and quarterly returns turn in their notices and leave due to the pressure and two-faced dances left in the wake of the district and regional managers. The game of dominoes goes down, with the shareholder expectations to go up.

Now it brings us into today. After Black Friday.

I completely blacked out the memeory of the events of that day and can only recall bits and pieces. The rush of working twenty-four hours in fourty-eight is jarring, with the addition of being a full-time student barely scrimping by on a ‘fall break’. The store is in disarray and the expectation is that I should be able to push a week’s worth of freight in one day, with no help as the others of my department decided to pursue other ventures the day before Black Friday. The dread is gone, but now comes the long, silent scream of chaos until Christmas Eve, where afterwards is simply stops. A switch is flipped. People (mostly) realize that they have the ability to converse like actual humans instead of wild animals unleashed upon the world. It also results in less stupid questions, but that is never truly avoidable when working in retail.

If anything is gleaned from this, it is the further desire to expedite my exit from retail, and it cannot come fast enough.