There are few things in this world that make me cringe. The phrase “Black Friday shopping” is one of them. I guess I can’t be too hard on the shopping aspect of the day because I’ve never been able to do it. I was always the miserable person working.
In my short life I’ve worked five Black Fridays. Five too many if you ask me – having to deal with long shifts, impatient customers, no breaks and huge clean up jobs. I can’t say I enjoyed a single one of those shifts, but some stand out as being far worse than the others.
The first four Black Fridays, I was working in various locations around the Premium Outlets in Birch Run, Mich., and if you’ve ever been there, you know is chaos even on regular weekends. Imagine buses upon buses of people filing in at a constant rate with no hope of stopping. More recently I was working at Briarwood Mall in Ann Arbor, which was a thousand times better.
My first two Black Fridays were spent working at McDonald’s. The first year I even had to work on Thanksgiving Day. Why anyone would want to eat at McDonald’s on Thanksgiving is beyond me, but we were open till 6 p.m. My Thanksgiving dinner was leftovers that I ate alone once I was finally able to go home. The second year, luckily, we closed for Thanksgiving. On Black Friday, however, at 5 a.m. people were lined up outside the door, grumpy and tired from shopping and demanding coffee.
The year after that I was working at Columbia Sportswear. This was by far the worst Black Friday for me and the thought of it still makes me shudder. I worked a total of 12 hours that day, split up into two different shifts. The 11 p.m. to 6 a.m. shift was a madhouse. A security guard had to let people in and out of the store so we didn’t have too many people, violating fire codes. He had to leave to handle an even crazier situation that was happening at Coach and one of our associates was forced to man the door.
We had a line that wrapped around the store and kept growing. It was to the point where you couldn’t move without bumping into a person or a rack of coats. Within any two-minute period at least six people would ask me to get them something and it was impossible to remember it all.
When my first shift ended I raced home to try and sleep but I was too wound up and annoyed.
I found out later that two different people had complained to my manager that I wasn’t being very cheerful to them. If I could I would have happily explained to these people that after 12 hours of being shoved, yelled at, insulted, disrespected and unable to drink enough caffeine I was about as cheerful as I could be.
The second half of my shift from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. was clean up. I returned to the store to find that the floor tiles had been replaced by a huge sheet of coats and fleece jackets. People had tried something on and then just discarded it on the floor, not even trying to hang it up. Half of our product had been trampled on by hoards of shoppers and now I had to help clean it up. No amount of money was worth the stress and bruises that day caused.
If you’re going out there to shop on Black Friday this year please remember that those people are giving up time with their friends and family to be working, and they have no choice. They are dealing with huge crowds for hours on end and it’s very hard to make sure everyone is helped.
Be patient if you have to wait for an item out of the back stock room or if lines are long. If an associate is going to get something for you don’t move, they won’t remember what you looked like and if you stay put they can find you. If you want to scope out deals there is a website dedicated to Black Friday at theblackfriday.com, and they post store ads right to the website.
I’m going to go shopping this year and see how it looks from the other side. Now that I don’t work retail I actually have the holiday off and for some reason I feel compelled to put myself in the center of the madness anyways. Maybe I’ll actually learn to like Black Fridays.