My heart is heavy today, and I haven’t even loaded up on Thanksgiving turkey yet (had a late breakfast). However, it’s depressing to write about an annual tradition which has officially ended this year and may never return.
Every year since at least 2014, I have performed an annual weighing of the Black Friday sales circulars which come with the newspaper delivery. This used to be a source of fascination and joy, to go to the front walk and retrieve the two papers (one more national, one more local), and bring them inside for the official estimate. My mother, a Depression-era woman, still had my old baby scale, which came in handy to weigh large roasts for the oven, and it also served well for determining how much newspaper we got for the holiday season.
I was tempted to do some arm curls because the heft of them both was so massive, and were the perfect size rolled up. Instead of a vertical roll, the carriers were forced to do a horizontal one, the number of ads for every store imaginable was so tremendous.
In the good old days, the total weight of the supplements would rival a good-sized bowling ball. In 2014, the total weight of the papers was a whopping ten pounds. I posted this information to social media, to the delight of readers.
In 2016, the papers slimmed down, weighing in at only 7.2 pounds.
In 2019 it was a measly 3.9 pounds.
The years of isolation and retail strife finally took their toll, and many of the reliable retailers were no longer even in business, such as K-Mart and Sears. Malls gave up on being open on Thanksgiving and the tradition of Black Friday returned to its rightfully scheduled position.
But then again, many of the traditions we grew up with also left us, such as massive toy displays at department stores such as were seen in the classic film A Christmas Story. The days of professional window dressers who toiled at bringing scenes of holiday happiness to life in a frozen retail dioramas ended when many of the big stores shut down or expanded their interior sales floor space into those originally occupied by windows for the outside world. We no longer even have a toy store to light up a child’s face with promises of Santa saturation. Kiddie City is long gone, and Toys”R”Us is now a department at Macy’s.
This year, the big sales ad was from the happy holdout of retail department stores, Boscov’s. The other ads were for electronics stores and bargain outlets. And the ads came on Wednesday.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t worth breaking out the scale this year. It’s over but for this afternoon’s trip to tryptophan land.
Perhaps this downfall should be attributed to the decline of the Boomer generation, for we were the ones who brought many of these yearly events into the world. Since we are leaving it, the things we brought to it will also go out of style. But what will those coming after us do for fun?
You can’t weigh the Internet, or gift cards.
It will be interesting to see what will come next Thanksgiving.
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