The Apocalypse – Women Shopping on ‘Black Friday’

When it comes to differences between men and women, we men believe we were inherently born with rational thought processes while women rely on their emotions for decision making, often to our extreme consternation and utter frustration.

When faced with undeniable facts, the majority of men can arrange those facts in a logical order and then arrive at the most reasonable conclusion that seemingly befits the situation. When you offer the same facts to a woman, she will carefully evaluate the information and then arrive at a conclusion that raises a man’s blood pressure to the boiling point.

Let’s look at an example of this drastic difference demonstrating women’s priorities that inevitably twist men’s brains into an entangled mass of spaghetti.

How Can Shopping Be So Evil?

Somehow over the years, shopping, an elixir for most women and the bane of most sober men, has become the Holy Grail that holds womanhood together. When the word shopping is mentioned even in a whisper, a woman will reflexively begin salivating like Pavlov’s dog.

Men are fascinated on one hand how women can shop for ten straight hours and triumphantly storm through the front door with a $1.99 item for which they scoured 40 stores, or on the other hand after two hours of shopping return with enough goods to fill a large bus.

How appropriate it is that women choose to do their heaviest shopping on Black Friday (the day after Thanksgiving), on a day that evokes painful memories of financial disaster throughout the land? In 1869, there was widespread financial panic when a group of financial speculators tried to corner the market on gold. Each year we celebrate this event as women drain every penny from their checking and savings accounts in a feeding frenzy of spending to buy literally every commodity that’s on sale or not nailed down. And if they decide to generously exploit their credit cards, they can run up a bill equal to the national debt of Slobovia in a matter of minutes. Women have been known to gut stores down to a few bricks when the owners offered overly generous discounts. One woman described the bloodbath as “Controlled madness.”

Women, who will spend between $8 and $10 billion on this one day, an amount greater than the entire budget of many countries, will often arise at 3 A.M. (or earlier) to be the first human being on line at the stores to start the mad rush to Christmas. These same women have been known to bring along Doberman Pinschers to protect their sacred place in line for the busiest shopping day of the year. One woman was shockingly observed exchanging her first born to triumphantly jump to the head of the line at Wal-Mart.

Rarely do women venture out on their own. They join their carefully chosen wolf pack of equally vicious meat eaters for there’s protection in numbers. We are supposed to believe that the reason for this utterly bizarre behavior is because the stores advertise substantial sales discounts to kick off the Christmas season, and the justification for this nationwide orgy is of course to save money. But it’s much more than that. For women, it’s a ritual akin to the ceremonial war dances enjoyed by pagan tribes who were also known to practice cannibalism. Women proudly inform their partners in crime they only spent $4,350 on Christmas presents but they saved $37 by taking no prisoners. Broken arms and legs are a regular byproduct of this bloodthirsty gladiatorial exhibition. It is rumored that more women wind up in jail charged with murder on this one day than the total number charged the rest of the year.

Most women could achieve equivalent savings by casually shopping on off hours any day before or after Black Friday and working one shift at McDonald’s – but that wouldn’t elicit the challenge – the camaraderie – the evil. Ignoring the fierce competition just wouldn’t get the juices flowing anywhere close to the best sexual orgasm they’ve experienced in a lifetime.

One exuberant shopper, Kathleen, was overheard telling her friend (actually her bodyguard) Betty, who spent 8 years in the Marines, why she purchased that brand new 60-inch high-definition television that can receive crystal clear transmissions from Mars. “Just look at the price – it’s almost $500 off,” to which Betty replied, “But you already have a gorgeous 105-inch gold-plated high-definition television.” “Yeah, sure,” she replied, “but look at how much money I saved!”

So What Can Men Do?

I almost forget to mention in passing that Kathleen’s husband Kevin spent the day at O’Halloran’s Bar drowning his sorrows trying to decide which bank he plans to rob to make this month’s mortgage. But that’s unimportant. It’s all for the kids – 10-year old kids with $500 cell phones that take pictures, play music, solve calculus equations, perform brain surgery, and I should mention in passing also let mom check on the little tyke’s whereabouts ten times a day. Any man over 50 remembers how we grew up. We were lucky if we had a dime in our pocket to call home in an absolute dire emergency, but today misguided parents lavish dozens of new toys on the spoiled brats regardless of the severe strain it places on their household budget.

The few men who were insane enough to join this melee (obviously Kevin was not one of them) were observed wearing fatigues, combat boots and Kevlar helmets while sporting at least an M-16 and a few hand grenades for a small degree of protection. The remainder of the men hide anywhere they can – in caves, bars and inside ballistically protected bomb shelters to watch anything on TV if a football games isn’t available, including Oprah.

Driving men mad, it doesn’t seem to penetrate women’s skulls that if they simply cut back on a few presents here and there, they could have easily saved $1,000 or even $2,000, but that wouldn’t be any fun, and Wonder Woman wouldn’t return home with a purple heart as a reward from the day’s killing fields.