No Black-Eyed Friday Shopping Here

One American custom we have not been nostalgic for is Black Friday, the retailers horror and the shopaholics wet dream.

The commonly broadcast definition of Black Friday being the day that retailers are finally making a profit, implying that they operate at starvation levels for the first eleven months of the year, is not necessarily the only definition of the day.

I have been calling the day black-eyed Friday because of violence associated with being that very first shopper in the door at Walmart at midnight. Running the risk of being trampled to death in a shopping stampede is not an exclusively American experience, injuries during sales events have happened over here.

But I am not aware of people having died, nor have I found any indication of pepper spray wielding moms defending that last toy.

Shopping in Germany is a fairly sedate affair, with the exception of some Saturday mornings in the final run-up to Christmas.

Historically, shopping around here may well be taking place in that comfort zone between ludicrously restrictive opening hours and the American free-for-all times where you can own a store or restaurant whose front doors cannot even be physically locked.

It took the Germans decades to get to their current supermarket hours, which generally are between eight in the morning and eight or ten at night.

Not that long ago, stores would close at six pm, with a single weekday where they'd close at eight. And that was already a hard-fought improvement over earlier days. In those earlier days, you could not even shop on Sunday in a train station convenience store if you did not have a ticket.

And they still close on public holidays.

We found that out one Monday morning as we were standing outside the small downtown market, going "but it says they open at eight, and it is already five to nine."

[Update 11/2015] This year, U.S. outdoor chain REI is opting out of Black Friday. They deserve a big thank you for this and will also get the blogster's outdoor dollars next time. The United Kingdom is doing Black Friday, although it should be named "the day nobody in the UK daintily stands in line for everything".