Black Friday 2008 4am Outside Circuit City

Thanksgiving Day is a great opportunity to spend time with family and friends, watch football, and ultimately pig out on Turkey and various other accoutrements. But when the holiday ends all of that food we shoveled down our gullets does more than just make us sleepy or give us the need to unbutton our pants; it also gives us the much needed weight gain that will provide us with a strategic advantage for the next morning's consumer-driven gift free-for-all known as "Black Friday." It's much easier to elbow an aging housewife out of the way to get to the last XBox Kinect, when you've put on an extra 5-10 lbs of meat-weight.

Every year on the Friday following Thanksgiving, a newly-rotund pack of sale-crazy customers rise at the crack of dawn to jockey for position for the best deals on everything from HDTVs to inexplicably popular electronic hamsters. It's a fairly common occurrence to hear of injuries and even deaths when the threat of losing out on sale items trumps the appeal for common courtesy and/or human decency.

It's a wonder this vicious cycle keeps repeating itself when the near 30 day difference between Thanksgiving and Christmas gives the majority of shoppers ample time to calmly peruse the store shelves like the civilized beings that we are–not to mention the fact that they can just as easily shop from the comfort of their own homes. Unfortunately, the word "sale" often serves as a sinister greed trigger, a key to the gateway wherein lies the most depraved examples of human behavior. It's kill or be killed for the sake of a toy or gadget.

Similar to the audience reaction on an episode of "Oprah" where she gives away her favorite things, the use of the word 'sale' on this particular day elicits a Pavlovian response even Pavlov himself couldn't have possibly imagined. Yet, corporations keep encouraging the behavior making their sales earlier and more pronounced.

According to BlackFriday2010.com Best Buy will be opening their doors at 5am, but handing out special "doorbuster item tickets at 3a.m." Though it hasn't been scientifically proven, I feel pretty safe saying the more ungodly the opening hour, the more crazed and dedicated the people willing to get in line that hour will be. And the longer you make those people wait once they've gotten in line, the closer you get to igniting the powderkeg of consumer-driven immaturity.

So while many a periodical is dispensing their primer on "Black Friday Safety," ask yourself one common sense question– do you really want to worry about your own safety while shopping? Take that Friday to enjoy the fact that you're with your family and worry about what you're going to get them for the holidays later. There's always "Cyber Monday."