Life at the retail-mega-super-duper-outlet-warehouse-store

From the news desk:

Andrew D. Brosig
Posted 11/29/17

Holidays are nice, particularly when they come attached to a long weekend away from the office.

This item is available in full to subscribers.

Please log in to continue

Log in

Life at the retail-mega-super-duper-outlet-warehouse-store

From the news desk:

Posted

Holidays are nice, particularly when they come attached to a long weekend away from the office.
That was, happily, the case this past weekend with the Thanksgiving holiday just concluded. Four (well, three-and-a-half) quiet, blissful days with nothing to do but catch up on sleep.
I say three-and-a-half because Thanksgiving Day itself found me in Lingle, covering the first-ever Community Thanksgiving Dinner gathering, hosted by a local family at the American Legion Hall. I spent a good couple of hours over there, watching people enjoy the home-cooked meal provided by Julie and Charlie Harshberger and their friends.
By all accounts, listening to the few people I was able to speak with between bites of turkey, ham, potatoes, green-bean casserole, etc., the food was good and it was a great opportunity to meet new folks over a shared meal.
There’s really nothing more basic than sharing a meal. All the way back into history, at public houses, taverns, hostels and more across Europe and, later, the young America, the breaking of bread with relative strangers became almost a nightly ritual when the days traveling or work was done.
It was a lot simpler fare in those days, true. But the idea of spending time in front of a roaring (or smoking, more often as not) fire after a day spent on horseback, on the hard, wooden seat of a wagon, or traveling by Shank’s Mare – walking, for you younger folks – was truly a time to relax.
Holidays add a particular dimension to the idea of sharing a meal, bringing together family and friends around the table, sharing stories and memories. At least, they’re supposed to.

Too many times, it seems, people are rushing through their Thanksgiving dinners or bypassing them all together. It’s almost as if they had somewhere they had to go. I wonder where that could be?
Ah, yes, the new, great deity of the modern age: The Black Friday bargain bonanza.
Now, I’ll tell you up front: I. Do. Not. Do. Black. Friday. Period. I, frankly, am personally appalled by the entire concept of Black Friday.
Why, you ask? Well, hang on. I’m going to tell you.
Most of my journalistic career has been spent as a newspaper photographer. As such, I’ve usually been the poor schmuck, stuck out at 4 a.m. on the Friday after Thanksgiving, chasing crazed shoppers up and down the aisles of some nameless retail-mega-super-duper-outlet-warehouse-store as they ran over their neighbors, knocked down small children and generally made a nuisance and a menace of themselves as they tried to reach the electronics department for one of the handful of deeply-discounted gadgets the retail-mega-super-duper-outlet-warehouse-store advertised to entice them there in the first place.
And most of the stuff that’s on sale on Black Friday is, frankly, crap. I remember, years ago, covering a Black Friday event at one of the retail-mega-super-duper-outlet-warehouse-stores. I actually have two, very distinct memories of that night.
The first is of a poor clerk, driven nearly to distraction, scaling a set of retail-mega-super-duper-outlet-warehouse-store shelves like a shipwreck victim clinging to a rock in the ocean, directing crazed shoppers – who were really too tightly packed into the aisle to decide where they wanted to go anyway. They just flowed around that set of shelves like the waters of the Nile headed for the ocean.
My second memory involves a young woman and massive boxes of cheap – I mean, really cheap – kitchen appliances. The kind that are so cheap they’re looked down upon by the people who sell cheap kitchen appliance on television at 4 a.m.
That’s cheap.
Anyway, my memory is of this woman, clutching a stack of cheap mini food processors, toasters, etc., like Golem with the One Ring, looking around warily as if someone would actually want to steal this stuff from her.
So, I guess, my final thought for this holiday season is to try to get back to a more relaxed time, get with family and friends, and, whatever you do, try to avoid the retail-mega-super-duper-outlet-warehouse-stores.
Who needs all those gadgets anyway?