Tomorrow is “Black Friday”, America’s biggest and busiest holiday. Retailers compete in frantic despair whilst shoppers demand below-cost prices and swarm like locusts whenever a maddened merchant cracks and commits Suicide by Sale.
It warms my very cockles, it does. And if you don’t even have cockles on this fine Black Friday Eve, Larry’s Mollusk and Snail Shack is having a “buy-one-get-one” tomorrow starting one single femto-second after midnight!
So collate those “Gimme Gimme” lists from greedy friends and relatives, plan your shopping and escape routes with equal diligence, and sharpen the elbows for giving your fellow celebrants the proper greeting!
And whatever else you do, America, do not be Thankful. The economy’s bad enough without you counting your blessings instead of your cash. As the carol says,
Hi, buy, buy low,
These high prices have to go!
Haillllll MAMMON!
World's Only Rational Man 
Frankly, from everything I’ve seen or heard I don’t think Black Friday is that bad. You have this mess once a year. We have it every Saturday. Seriously, Saturdays are AWFUL here. everyone and his grandmother invades the shopping centers. Finding a parking space? Yeah, prepare to rotate an hour or two. Want to get anywhere? Bring a riot shield.
Okay, so people aren’t fighting over goods they want to buy, but we’ve had an increasing number of violence over parking spots.
I’m thinking about a sprightly Black Friday jingle celebrating crazed shopping. Thanks for the reminder about parking!
There are our “intellectuals” here, who pat themselves on their backs over so much better we people in Europe are compared to the Americans with their Black Friday.
Two stories to show how “superior” and “sophisticated” we are.
First one comes from a friend of mine, who’s with the police. They were called to a tiny rear-end accident in stop and go traffic on a lane heading to one of our shopping malls. All that does is a slight bump, no damage. Apparently the guy who got rear-ended had jumped out of his car and then attacked the other guy’s care with… an axe.
One I saw myself: one guy pulling another guy out of his car and then brawling on the highway over something similar.
And especially in the districts across the Danube, where parking spaces are particularly hard to find, I hear of people shooting and stabbing each other over said parking spaces pretty much every week. Same in Germany. There one case I know involved a guy attacking the car of someone who had cut him off with a sledgehammer. I doubt it’s any different in other countries. Probably worse, especially in the southern countries, where tempers flare a lot easier than here.
Yeah, we’re so superior. There are so many people, both here and across the Pond, who seem to think that our farts don’t stink. Let me tell you, the average European is just as dumb and vulgar as the average American.