Dec. 6, 2006 – Originally published by CNC, Inc.

Black Friday And The Almighty Power Of Marketing

You probably just grabbed your newspaper, plucked a soda from the fridge, and sat down in your easy chair, just like the Queen or Keen of Sheba, to read this column and all the other worthy items contained within these pages, secure in the knowledge that you have completely finished your Christmas shopping. Am I right? You, my friend, are done! You started on “Black Friday,” went straight on through Saturday, sleeping by the roadside and living on coffee and Cinnabon products, and now you’re done. You are the people that make me very, very nervous.

Our country is increasingly hyper-suggestive and gullible, it seems. How else do you explain the return of the skinny pant? Sure, it looked good on Audrey Hepburn, but she weighed 95 pounds soaking wet. I tried on a pair at The Gap, and looked like one of the Whos down in Whoville. Marketing, my friends! In reality, about 1 percent of the current population looks good in the skinny-leg jeans, and they aren’t old enough to vote, so don’t buy into the hype. Those jeans only look good on actors or children. You just stay in those sweat pants, like God intended you to.

Now, these marketers are intent on getting you to start your Christmas shopping on “Black Friday” or even sooner, if they have their way. Marketers are people with degrees who drink lots of coffee and are under huge pressure from people they call “clients” to lead you around dropping gobs of money at various stores. They thought up the new phrase, “You got it at Jared’s,” for jewelry shoppers when you can’t even find a Jared’s. Marketers have no heart, and they’re still mad about what they call the “Halloween Village Fiasco” wherein we did not all go out in October and by tiny ceramic Halloween villages and set them in our windows like they were sure they would. No, we were just a little too smart for them — little did they know we’d be too busy watching “Deal or No Deal” and “Rockstar Supernova” to buy into their silliness. So, the marketers are feeling the heat right about now, and their mission was to get you into the stores on Thanksgiving night, turkey still on your breath, leaving relatives who know better snoozing on the couch.

This is the way it works — they start a phrase, like “Black Friday.” Something you will begin saying to co-workers and receptionists; “Hey, are you going out shopping on Black Friday?” Now, this question has a lot more value put that way than if you said, “Hey, are you crazy enough to leave a warm holiday home full of family and friends and stand in line at a cash register only to realize that your ATM card is in your other pants?” See how it works? They start the phrase.

Then, they get the stores to issue savings like you’ve never seen before — why, you’re giddy just reading the fliers! The marketers ideally want you perusing these fliers at the dining room table during the Thanksgiving prayer or while the turkey is being sliced, obscuring everyone’s view of everyone else. But hey, you’ll save a few dollars — I think even the Pilgrims hustled the Native Americans back to their side of the campus so that they could get a jump on the sales at the Macys over by Plymouth Rock.

I say the holidays aren’t the holidays without that last-minute frenzy, driving around aimlessly in a too-crowded parking lot, then listening to holiday music as you desperately peruse each store for gifts for your loved ones, winding up coming home with sweaters, gift certificates, and one particularly desperate year, two bonsai trees. I’m not sure we should loaf around too much before the holidays — I think we’ll buy more. Shopping in December is just a part of our human DNA by now. So, if you haven’t finished, or haven’t even started shopping yet, this one is for you. I’ll see you at the mall on Dec. 24 with bells on. But no skinny pants, of course.