I haven't worked retail in over fifteen years. And I don't remember the day after Thanksgiving being a huge deal when I was a kid—other than it was another day out of school. 

I worked at my parent's bookstore (along with my brothers), and the Christmas season was busy. But it was busy for weeks, not just on one day.

Not sure if people who lived in Clovis in the 80s drove the not quite two hours (highways were 55 max in those days) to Amarillo or Lubbock on the day after Thanksgiving for the Texas-sized deals. Or if there were even big extra crazy loss leader sales in those days.

There was one night (and, it probably wasn't during the Christmas season, but it was dark when I left) at the bookstore when a lady loaded up the counter with hundreds of dollars of books and other things. I wrote out the receipts (each page was about 20 entries, and this one took a few to get everything onto), added it up, and was already keeping the store open by almost an hour to service this lady. 

I was happy to do this. It was a pretty good sale and totally would justify the extra time. Not that I got commission, but it was a family business.

Back in those days, hardly anyone had a credit card machine hooked up to a phone line to check if they were good or not. The credit card companies sent out printed booklets with the numbers of bad cards in them. You had to flip through to find out if a card was good or bad. Most of the time, we didn't check. We could also call in and read the number over the phone. And I rarely did this, either.

But this was a lot of books. A huge sale. So I called it in (the booklets were pretty much useless, they were a month or more old when they made it to the store). Declined. The lady, who had been pretty happy go lucky up until that point, asked me to check again. Still declined. She made some noise about something or other (although none of the bile was directed toward me, and she seemed, after the two declines, to know why this had occurred) and asked me to hold her pile of merch for the next day.

She never came back in. I restocked her picks. And whenever people came in close to closing time after that, I made a point to let them know the store generally closed at 5:30.

I woke up around four in the morning on Friday. My stomach was still full from my Thanksgiving day gorging the night before. I'd eaten two full plates of food, as well as a big breakfast to start the day. Plus wine. I never eat that much in a day. And my body was letting me know. Eventually I sat on the cold porcelain to relieve the pressure. I'd actually get up at close to ten in the morning.

No shopping on Friday. Leftovers. Some pumpkin pie. I watched Heat.

Black Friday is concentrated on a rather small cluster of big chain stores. It's like going to a convention of sleep-deprived sales zombies. Workers at the stores have to work crappy hours. Customers have to endure lack of sleep and bitter cold. And, apparently, this is appealing to a lot of people. 

Sales were up 6.6% from last year.

Saturday was declared small business day. No caps because it's small. And small business, which seems to be about local business, can mean a lot of things. The Christmas shopping I've done so far is all from small businesses. But most of them aren't local. Does it count? Is someone keeping score?

Early reports show that Nob Hill, which is a cluster of local businesses and eateries near where I live, was quite busy on Saturday.

I didn't want to shop on Saturday either, but I had to do laundry and had forgotten to get more detergent the week before.

So I went into Wal-Mart (actually just a bit closer to my place than Nob Hill), filled up a hand basket with essentials and got out of there as fast as I could. Which was pretty fast since everyone else had apparently been in the store the day before.

But mostly I've been hiding from the masses this holiday. Kind of a pre-holiday isolationist retreat from the rest of the world. Don't worry, I'll get back out there soon. The long weekend is almost over.

Matt Worley thinks most of those crazy Black Friday deals will be back on the semi-black market (like eBay) soon, if they aren't already. But they'll be just a little more expensive than before. And that's capitalism, kids.