{"id":17853,"date":"2015-11-27T17:51:34","date_gmt":"2015-11-28T00:51:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=17853"},"modified":"2015-11-30T09:21:23","modified_gmt":"2015-11-30T16:21:23","slug":"black-friday","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=17853","title":{"rendered":"Black Friday"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a title=\"31867\" href=\"https:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/halfmind\/22728640794\/in\/dateposted-public\/\" target=\"_blank\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft\" src=\"https:\/\/farm1.staticflickr.com\/698\/22728640794_44131e370a_m.jpg\" alt=\"31867\" width=\"240\" height=\"177\" \/><\/a>Black Friday is a tawdry commercial invention and I won&#8217;t give it the dignity of calling it tradition, no matter how many years it&#8217;s been going on. A tradition I endorse, on the other hand, is the Black Friday horror story.<\/p>\n<p>Another tradition I endorse is avoiding human contact by shopping online. But in a\u00a0fit\u00a0of Thanksgiving-inspired good will, I offered to brave the Black Friday\u00a0crowds with\u00a0Donna. Our shopping list was un-Christmaslike: we\u00a0needed\u00a0a new faucet for the\u00a0kitchen sink, a floor lamp for the\u00a0sewing room, a new chair for the office, a broom and dustpan for the kitchen, some air filters for the furnace.<\/p>\n<p>To our surprise,\u00a0driving was stress-free:\u00a0it might have been\u00a0Sunday morning in Tucson, the streets\u00a0almost empty. One driver flipped us off as he passed in the opposite direction, so maybe his Black Friday wasn&#8217;t going so well. Ours was almost too easy.\u00a0Our first stop was a local non-chain plumbing fixture store, where\u00a0Donna found the faucet she was looking for and I fell in love with a Toto toilet that magically raised its lid whenever I walked by. Hey, a guy can dream, can&#8217;t he? Also, too: a day early but we can claim we also supported Small Business Saturday.<\/p>\n<p>The second stop was Jo-Ann Fabric, where the floor lamp Donna wanted was on sale. By now the roads were no longer empty, and on the way to get the lamp\u00a0we had to thread our way through heavy traffic around Park Mall, a wretched hive\u00a0of Black Friday madness! Jo-Ann&#8217;s was a couple of miles past\u00a0the mall, but nearly\u00a0as crowded. Still, we found a parking place and\u00a0got our lamp with no significant fuss.<\/p>\n<p>We stopped for lunch\u00a0and decided to blow off looking for a\u00a0new office chair, mainly\u00a0because going to Office Max meant driving\u00a0past\u00a0the mall again. A quick stop at the\u00a0neighborhood hardware store for filters and a broom on the way home, and we were done.<\/p>\n<p>Our Black Friday wasn&#8217;t horrific at all. Of course, your mileage may have varied.<\/p>\n<p>Real shopping, as in anniversary and Christmas presents? Amazon, baby. Amazon all the way.<\/p>\n<p>Tell you what, though, you don&#8217;t get an experience like this when you&#8217;re shopping online. Click the image to roll the video:<\/p>\n<p><center><\/p>\n<figure style=\"width: 640px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><a title=\"IMG_2673\" href=\"https:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/halfmind\/23249702742\/in\/album-72157631652064064\/\" target=\"_blank\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/farm1.staticflickr.com\/726\/23249702742_d8a2f21a6b_z.jpg\" alt=\"IMG_2673\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\" \/><\/a><figcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Click to see the video<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p><\/center><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Black Friday is a tawdry commercial invention and I won&#8217;t give it the dignity of calling it tradition, no matter how many years it&#8217;s been going on. A tradition I endorse, on the other hand, is the Black Friday horror story. Another tradition I endorse is avoiding human contact by shopping online. But in a\u00a0fit\u00a0of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,2],"tags":[2006,1062,2007,818],"class_list":["post-17853","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-consumerism","category-personal","tag-crowds","tag-shopping","tag-toilet-video","tag-traffic"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17853","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=17853"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17853\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17866,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17853\/revisions\/17866"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=17853"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=17853"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=17853"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}