My First Black Friday Experience in the US

By Bhakti Shah

I knew that the day after Thanksgiving is the biggest shopping day of the year in the US, but I did not know that it was such a big thing. When my husband told me that people line-up in queues for hours outside stores, I hardly believed him. I thought it was an exaggeration. However, the opportunity to clear this doubt came sooner than I thought.

My husband I went to the movie theater on the night of Thanksgiving to watch ‘Harry Potter & the Deathly Hallows’. It was past midnight when the movie ended and we were on our way back home when my husband took me to Target & Best Buy to show me how people line up for Black Friday shopping. I was surprised to see long queue at 12:30 AM because the stores were supposed to open at 4 AM in the morning. The sight of people camping in tents outside shops was unbelievable to me. We saw some people dancing to the tune of music and some enjoying drinks to keep themselves warm.

We then went to the Grand Prairie mall, an open construction mall in Peoria, as some shops in that mall had opened at midnight. I thought that there wouldn’t be long queues in the mall as many stores in the mall were clothing related stores. But I was surprised to see a longer queue at Old Navy compared to that at Best Buy! As I walked through the open mall, I was not able to withstand the cold weather & hence we decided to go back home after some time. We rested for few hours and then woke up early morning to visit some stores in another mall and thus I made most out of my Black Friday outing.

Hats off to the American shopping enthusiasm, which is virtually unaffected, even by the extreme cold weather!