Black Friday

Today is Friday, the day after Thanksgiving. It is a common off-work day. Most of the New York companies give this day off since it does not make any sense to go in for one day. So, this became a major before Christmas shopping day. In order to get a leg up on the "frenzied crowd" stores used to open up just around midnight to get started.

This year the earliest opening I saw was 5 am. Even that is brutal for the ones who work there. It is very interesting to see, that no matter how much people complain that there is no work, no money and everything is so expensive, this time they still go and buy toys galore, TVs, electronic devices, etc. I guess when the family come into the picture being cheap or frugal is out the window. This is very nice.

Yesterday the weather was beautiful, sunny and mild. Today it is the opposite. Raining and cooler. But this will not slow down the frantic shoppers. Actually, the malls are all indoors and so is their parkings. This makes shopping that much easier.

In my working years when I was out in construction sites, I always worked on this day even though the home office was closed. The reason was that this Friday was not a union holiday. If management told the workers not to come in, they would have to pay them a day's pay. In order to avoid that we always said that this Friday was a regular workday. Interestingly, no worker ever showed up. Only the construction super and I, the construction manager was there. We stuck around a few hours, bs-d then went home.

This was fine with me, because in addition to the company holiday I did get an additional day's pay. Just for showing up. What a country!