This is evidently highly culturally specific...
I apparently need to explain this so our friends across the ponds can understand the fascination behind this clusterf**k:
The USA observes Thanksgiving Day -- where we celebrate the raping and pillaging of the Native Americans after they brought some starving white people a bunch of food and said "please don't kill us" -- on the 4th Thursday in November. The day after is called "Black Friday," as it is an important shopping day (Black being the color for profit on a spreadsheet, as opposed to red for a loss). You see, unlike many older cultures, Americans are kind of dicks in that we never buy gifts for people unless we really, really have to, so most of us go out shopping before Christmas en mass because we have to do so, not because we actually like each other. It's also how parents buy affection from their children (especially divorced parents... mine didn't divorce until I was 24 and had a full-time job, so I missed out :bang
🙂
Many stores put on very big sales to attract customers, with some stores opening in the very early morning hours (like 0400 or so). This year, some retailers are just going to open up Thursday night (which has created this huge backlash, but that's another story).
How do the stores get these great discounts? Well, they buy extra-cheap items and pass them off as "good" items, or they put out a very few items -- like 6 of each thing they advertize -- at such a low price people will come in from miles around to buy. When they get in the door (other than the first 6 people), they find the store is out, so they often buy a more expensive item instead. These are usually things not selling very well to begin with, so the Americans get their plastic junk fix while the retailers make their bankers in the Cayman Islands happy.
You see, we're a simple people. We used to jump into European wars for our own amusement and to give the largest corporations some way of making mad amounts of money, but since the 1990s, the Europeans have been too well behaved to even play cold war with us. Now we have to buy cheap crap made in China to stay entertained. The whole system is a cross between the Floating Fortress construction (a giant waste of resources, rather than fixing the problems of the nation) in George Orwell's "1984" and the watching police chases on our huge TVs and driving our cars way too fast from Ray Bradbury's "Fahrenheit 451."
