Black Friday
I am not sure where Black Friday gets its name since the adjective “black” usually denotes a calamity of some sort. What I do know is that the commercial world wants us to start our Christmas shopping as early as possible. We in America have tacitly agreed to allow Christmas shopping to begin no earlier than Thanksgiving. That logically makes the Friday after Thanksgiving a big retailer day. The retail trade, both brick & mortar and online, try to make a big deal of the day by launching endless promotions and sales on that day. We are not babes in the woods and know that Black Friday is a very different kind of retail day than December 26th, which we call Boxing Day. While Boxing Day was supposed to be the second day of Christmastide (of the twelve) and was intended to be a day to give alms to the poor in the form of wrapped gifts, that aspect had been largely lost. In its stead is another shopping holiday. Since Americans have never bought into the twelve days of Christmas concept (other than knowing about the partridge in a pear tree thing), and have certainly never celebrated Twelfth Night, sometimes called Epiphany and then again, often called Three King’s Day. Boxing Day never caught on the way it did in places like England or as Befana caught on in Italy. Our Christian roots like to think that the legend of the Christmas Star and the three wise men, the Biblical Magi, bearing gold (a symbol of prosperity), frankincense (an incense symbolic of Godliness), and myrrh (an embalming oil, I guess to symbolize death), is a very special event to herald the birth of Christ. But here in America, Christmas more or less still ends when Christmas Day ends. That leaves December 26th available for retail.
But December 26th is a very different kind of retail day. Obviously, the day after Christmas is all about holiday surplus and the likelihood of getting a real bargain once the holiday is over is far greater than any retailer suggestion that the start of the holiday season is likely to lead to any serious savings. Nonetheless, if you can restrict yourself to whatever come-on sale items are offered to prime your spending pump, you might be able to snag a deal. For instance, I buy lots of clothes from Duluth Trading. I love the advertisements they use, which always feature big, burly, manly me who suffer from butt-crack display syndrome. They make clothes that seriously address the issues that men of my size grapple with every day. The shirttails are longer, the pants have diamond-shaped pieces in the crotch to preclude binding, and everything seems to have an added bit of spandex or some such material so that the cloth has some forgiveness to it. They also offer rugged clothes that are meant for working men in addition to more genteel wardrobe items that can be worn to the office or out to dinner. They sell those at very reasonable prices and I think they have found a very solid market segment that will always buy what they offer. My favorite Duluth item are their work pants with cargo pockets everywhere. They suit my gardening and motorcycling lifestyle to a T. At this exact moment, I am wearing a pair of their cargo pants with Duluth socks, Duluth knit boxer shorts and a long-sleeved white pocket T-shirt that I have gotten emblazoned with Hidden Meadows Garden Club on the back. I am not wearing the Duluth slip-on work boots today, but I did wear them yesterday. I am all-in on Duluth as you can see.
Therefore, I am on the Duluth mailing list and probably get an email from them every day. It is not one of the emails that I choose to unsubscribe because it is my personal reminder as to whether or not I need anything from my favorite haberdasher. For Black Friday, they suddenly have a super-duper offer on my favorite cargo pants (I must be careful because Duluth has done so well at their target marketing that they offer perhaps a dozen varieties of these same pants in the same array of colors (khaki, brown, copper, black, navy and grey). It is very easy to go down the wrong varietal path and be slightly disappointed (nothing from Duluth is bad, it is just not perfect sometimes) with the choice when it comes. I venture into the site and find that I can get $74 pants for $49 using their two-tier discounts. That’s a meaningful ⅓ off, so I chose to buy two pairs in khaki (you can never go wrong with khaki). I know I have a few mis-fired pairs that I can give away when those two pairs arrive. As for the come-on aspect, I hate to say it, but Duluth Marketing has failed. I did think about knocking around in the online store and choosing some other items, but I uncharacteristically used some discipline and decided that there is nothing else I really NEED at the moment. My daily emails will certainly show me some sales on those items as the season progresses.
One of the reasons I am comfortable buying even more pants, since Duluth pants wear like iron and rarely need replacing, is that I have a new outlet for my castoffs. One of Kim’s fellow Encore singers is a large 30-year-old bearded bear of a young man who is almost my size in height and girth. We discovered this similarity when the last performance required certain costuming only to find that this earnest young tenor did not have an appropriate shirt or the means to buy one. Kim asked and I allowed that we should give him a choice of several of my shirts to wear. When I saw him on stage wearing the shirt, I was impressed at how well it fit him. That gave rise to a conversation between me and Kim and I proceeded to gather up an array of a dozen pants, 30 shirts, belts, a sports jacket and even a leather coat. It all fit him perfectly, so after checking his shoe size, on the next week we added a dozen pair of shoes. The young man was very appreciative of it all and he and his girlfriend commented to Kim that it all did wonders for his sense of self respect since he was able to upgrade his image in such a meaningful way. I have often wondered how people of my size get themselves clothed if they are not as fortunate as I am to be able to afford these things (everything costs more at my size, as you can imagine). It is meaningful to me that I have someone who can benefit from my plus-size wardrobe and it makes me feel good that the things I no longer need or do not really wear often can get put into active service with someone worthy.
So, in a strange way, even though it is not technically Boxing Day and I did not start out trying to give alms to the less fortunate, that is what has happened and it allows me to dip back into Duluth to improve my wardrobe within a limited and defined range. I still have those dozen or more business suits (already cut in half over the past few retirement years), ties galore and even more business causal dress slacks than I think I will ever need. I am not inclined to throw them out, but if I can find someone worthy to take them off my hands, I appear to be open to the idea.
I have now learned why Black Friday is called “black”. It seems that in the 1950’s retailers were searching for a reason to get behind that name and they came up with the notion that the only thing that kept them out of the red (i.e. from being unprofitable) was the holiday shopping season. If the ledger is not red, it turns black and being in the black is a good thing for any business. So, I will extrapolate that I have found my groove this Black Friday by taking my psychic ledger of feel-good into the black, thanks to Kim’s choral buddy and Duluth Trading.