Culture Question -- How long until "Black Friday" & "Cyber Monday" are real holidays?

[jluetjen]

While I was at my inlaws on Long Island for the Thanksgiving holiday, I happened across a TV news report about the pepper-spray incidents on Friday that started out with something like ...

The joy of shopping season was marred today by incidents of people being pepper-sprayed...

"The joy of the shopping season???"

Today all of the news is about "Cyber Monday".

The press seems to be succumbing to it's basest "yellow journalism" tendencies by hyping the two days more and more each year.

1st: Since when has the point of the Christmas season been buying gifts? To put it differently, has anyone ever come across anyone who got joy from the intense shopping process of the holidays? More often than not my experience has been that people grit their teeth and wade into the fray. I'm not suggesting that people don't like giving gifts to their loved ones -- but process of fighting through a scrum of shoppers to get the 1 item which is marked down by 50% is far removed from the family focus that Thanksgiving and Christmas used to have.

2nd; Now the holiday of Thanksgiving is being pushed aside to add a few hours or maybe a day to the Christmas shopping season. Does anyone really think that this extra day is going to generate additional revenue as opposed to just pull-in spending that would have occurred later on?

Does anyone else get the impression that the current state of affairs is bringing out the basest instincts in our culture?

[doug_porsche]

Nope, that not how marketing works.

Soon Black Friday will start on Good Friday just before Easter. So with the "After Christmas" sales ending just before Valentines day, we will have to start "Christmas in July" in March...

Thats okay, In an effort to avoid the rush, I have already started the Presidential Recall/Impeachment proceedings on the winner of the 2012 election.

But because most of America has ADD, they will not notice anyway. Look a chicken!