I’ve never gotten in a fight at a Walmart on Black Friday, but I’ve come close. It was about 15 years ago, and I was visiting my parents back home in rural Illinois. My father wanted a new TV to watch baseball in his basement. He’d read about a Samsung model that was 25 percent off on Black Friday and found out they only had a dozen in stock. Those are gonna go fast, Dad said, which is how we found ourselves lined up on Thanksgiving night, jockeying for position, waiting for the stampede to begin.
The clock neared midnight. My dad looked at me. Ready?
I nodded back, lying. I wasn’t ready. Who could be?
With a ding, the doors opened, and we were off. It felt a little like the running of the bulls, only with shopping carts. We raced to the electronics section and saw not 12 but four Samsung models. I bumped into a guy going for the same TV. “Watch it, buddy,” he said, and I growled, “Hey, you watch it, pal” right back. We glared at each other, and then continued our mad dash. Fortunately for the case docket of the Coles County Sheriff’s Office that evening, there were still TVs for us both. Had there been only one left, one of us would probably still be in jail.
Walmart stopped opening at midnight for Black Friday years ago, but the culture has moved on from “Jingle All the Way”-style shopping battles anyway. Black Friday is now mostly virtual; the deal we’re after is just a click away, and, depending on the aggressiveness of your particular AI agent, maybe even closer than that. And while I doubt there’s much nostalgia for trying to box out some dude in Aisle 3, I do wonder if some of what makes Thanksgiving special has slipped away.
In our consumerist, post-Covid culture, how long till Thanksgiving turns into a Zoom event? What was once a several-day affair — Thanksgiving dinner Thursday, shopping on Black Friday, getting together with your old high school buddies on Saturday, traveling home exhausted on Sunday — is getting whittled down to just one day. And more and more, that day is about sitting around watching the television and staring at our phones.
The decline of brick-and-mortar retail has mostly ended the need to spend time in a checkout line; last year my family had most of its holiday shopping done before we even put the leftover turkey in Tupperware. But the holiday weekend, in a streaming age, has also become a focus of the entertainment and, especially, sports industries.
What was once one Lions game and one Cowboys game, plus some good college football on Saturday, is now a full-on four-day extravaganza. There are three NFL games on Thanksgiving (one on FOX, CBS and NBC, as well as their streaming equivalents) and another Friday, on Prime Video. The Saturday after Thanksgiving has always been a huge college football day because of Rivalry Week, but now those games have migrated to Friday. (Arguably the three most important games to determining the college football playoff bracket — Texas-Texas A&M, Georgia-Georgia Tech and Mississippi-Mississippi State — are all on Friday this year.) The NBA Cup is in full swing Friday, too. There are an endless string of college basketball tournament games. There’s even a big wrestling pay-per-view (in a baseball stadium no less) this weekend. Oh, and the final season of “Stranger Things” starts streaming on Netflix on Wednesday, the Hallmark Channel is counting down to Christmas all week, and there is no way you’re getting out of the weekend without watching “Elf.”
As we have become an increasingly shut-in society, the culture has shifted to meet us where we are: the couch. The idea of heading out into public to do anything — let alone wrestle a stranger for a television or a doll — has become faintly unpleasant, even anachronistic, like waiting outside a record store at midnight for an album release. Thanksgiving remains a day of service for some, a day for volunteering at soup kitchens or giving out meals to the needy. But even that has gone virtual to a degree: Feeding America’s big Thanksgiving Food Drive is conducted entirely online.
Yes, Thanksgiving remains a massive travel weekend — it’s set to break another record, despite lingering concerns about the just-ended government shutdown — but are we doing all that traveling to go from one television, iPad or phone screen to another? It’s a lot of moving around just to end up sitting in a room not moving. Which does make you wonder if we’re eventually going to eliminate the middleman. Why keep going over the river and through the woods to grandmother’s house? Grandma has FaceTime now.
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