It’s Black Friday and everywhere you look there are offers: 50% off this! Buy one of these and have this too! Limited sale on this thing! One hour and then anything that remains gets burned right in front of your stupid, desperate faces! Heck, you can’t even avoid it here – once you’ve read this drivel you can carry on reading my entire website at no extra cost! But hurry – those words won’t be there forever! Once they’re gone they’re gone etc… Personally I miss the old Black Fridays, where people would get together and get down to the sounds of Rebecca Black’s Friday. Now it’s hideously commercial, and barely any of us will spare a moment to think of Rebecca Black at all. It’s like the true meaning of the day has been all but forgotten.

All but forgotten

The added bonus of Black Friday offers on websites such as this, of course, is that there’s a distinct lack of unwanted bodily contact with other fleshbots. The likelihood of bumping into a tangible human within this article whilst you read this is so remote I’ve barely considered it. But out there in the street in the physical realm it’s a different matter – shops and high streets have been temporarily turned into large hadron colliders of humanity, with thousands of grown adults aggressively bumping into one another, creating something like a big mass of anti-adult, or ‘mindless fucking children’ to borrow simpler terminology; hordes of individuals screaming ‘mine’ and ‘I got it first’. It’s like the brutal law of the playground, except there’s no supervising teacher to occasionally remind them that it isn’t how any acceptable society functions.

Some shoppers are, in all fairness, hopeful to snap up that all-important gift for a loved one at a price that doesn’t send them spiralling into an all-consuming debt. Others however, are taking the first steps into opening their own electronics business: one American woman on television this morning had three HD televisions teetering precariously on top of her trolley, which had a number of espresso machines inside of it. Buy it all cheap, sell it for an inflated price later – it’s the kind of ‘classic entrepreneurship’ that gets Tory culture minister Sajid Javid all warm in his downstairs, whilst it’s the kind of bare-faced opportunism that makes me want to repeatedly smack myself in my upstairs.

I find it strange that some commentators and news reporters describe Black Friday scenes in participating stores as ‘apocalyptic’. Sure, there’s a zombie-like quality to the focussed aggression on many of the faces which don’t get trodden into the laminated shop flooring by their fellow man; and yes, it kind of looks like the looting which might happen if we were awaiting the end of days. But why looters during an apocalypse would be frantically accumulating widescreen TVs and Nespresso machines as opposed to provisions and makeshift-weapons is beyond me – what are they expecting to tune into? When are they going to sit down with a latte? If anything, Black Friday is an annual reminder that in spite of everything it’s business as usual in our consumerist bubble of a society. It’s hard to imagine even the most dedicated bargain-hunter queuing overnight to get into a Tesco when Armageddon is knocking at their door.

I have never taken part in a Black Friday Grabathon, so I am not in the best position to comment on whether the cons outweigh the pros. I’ve never knowingly trampled over humans or wrestled a stranger over a speaker system, but I can’t see that I’d enjoy it. Some possibly do. Perhaps for some people, Black Friday is a fantastic excuse to shove, kick and punch Joe Public for a few hours with the only con being that you’re expected to buy a telly at the end of it.

Some shops have attempted to avoid the violence of previous years by drafting up ‘rules’ and printing off special Black Friday ‘ettiquette’ leaflets in an attempt to avoid actual deaths. On the one hand the measures seem well-intended and sensible, on the other they strike me as futile – like tying a napkin round a hyena’s neck and asking it to sit the dinner table. But if it prevents at least a few injuries or actual deaths – yes, that’s actual people dying SHOPPING – then it will have been worthwhile.

‘Tis the season!

It’s not entirely negative – I mean, in some respects I suppose it’s quite heartening. In the wake of the terror attacks in Paris, I can only imagine that Isil and it’s followers expected the West to remain indoors for at least a decade clinging to their nearest and dearest and spending all their hard-earned cash on private security. Instead, we’re shoving over grannies for knockdown iPads and punching single parents over PS4s. Many shoppers show the kind of ruthless aggression and unflinching determination that would make them ideal recruits for Isil, if only it were a promise of 72 Ultra-HD televisions instead of the usual offer. Make no mistake – Black Friday is precisely the kind of thing that the terrorists would do away with if they ever got their way. Right after they bagged some half-price fertiliser and discounted nails of course, the fucking hypocrites.

So with that in mind, perhaps Black Friday is something that, God-awful as it is in it’s most extreme cases, we should embrace and welcome as part of our cultural traditions at this time of year: before all of the schmalz and forced bonhomie; before the first door of the advent calendar is opened and the tree is taken down from the loft – get yourself down to a shop and barge your way to something you only just realised you needed! Bring all the family too – after all you’ll work better as a pack! And remember – elbows out, keep feet firmly planted on the floor, and grab yourself a heavily-discounted Christmas.