After stuffing your face with turkey, mashed potatoes, and pie on Thanksgiving, you might want to sit back and relax while your stomach settles.  However, there are those who do the exact opposite, and frantically run out to go Black Friday shopping to catch the best deals right after eating their feast.

In my opinion, Black Friday is a fun experience to participate in, if you do it right.  Being out all hours of the night is an adrenaline rush, plus you can definitely get a lot for your money’s worth if you shop at the right places.

On the other hand, a large majority of stores have taken advantage of the concept of Black Friday over the years, but have fallen short of the intended mark. Recently, I have been noticing that each year stores’ “huge sales” have been getting less and less impressive.  

Nowadays, some stores will offer small deals such as having 20% off store-wide.  Personally, I feel as if you can find a store that offer 20% off at any time of the year.  Black Friday is supposed to be a day for huge savings, and getting 20% off a purchase is no big deal from my point of view.  This defeats the purpose of Black Friday, supposedly the single best day for sales. 

Over the years, stores and departments have been breaking the tradition of opening at 12:00 a.m. on Friday, and instead are opening earlier than usual, on Thursday night.  Unfortunately, this interrupts the time families have together, as some people are beginning to sacrifice family time for materialistic pursuits. 

Along with this concept of needing to be one of the first people in line, it seems that this is the time of year where people get a little crazy and resort to bad behavior.  Strangers will nearly fight to the death with one another over a materialistic item. There seems to be a story every year of consumers trampled on the way into a store to beat one another to a prized possession.

Over the years, blackfridaydeathcount.com has reported that there has been 7 deaths, and 98 injuries due to the chaos of Black Friday.  The fact that people have died and been injured just to save a few bucks is obviously ridiculous and says some rather tragic things about our consumer culture.

Although I know I personally cannot change anything, if it were up to me, Black Friday would stay the traditional way it started, and stores would open at midnight on Friday, and no earlier. It can be a fun experience, but let’s not forget how to prioritize.