Last week, I posted a gif on this site that summarized how terrible I expected Black Friday to be as a retail worker. This was my third Black Friday working at my retail store, and in previous years it was SO BUSY. I would come home after those shifts and sleep for 12 hours just to let my body recover from the insanity.

Even with the Covid-19 pandemic this year, I still expected Black Friday to be busy. This past summer, we would have long lineups of people waiting to get into our store, so I expected that Black Friday would be even worse. Despite the rising Covid cases in BC, my faith that people would stay home this year was pretty low.

Well, I guess I was wrong! My store did not have people lining up to come inside. It was maybe a little bit busier than the average weekend, but not by a lot. At first, I wondered if only my store had been affected by this, but when looking at other stores in the mall, it seems like we were all in the same situation.

I would love to think that this is all related to people finally realizing that they should stay home when possible, but I feel like there is another factor at play. Black Friday is not so much a day as it is a week. Most stores, mine included, have Black Friday deals going for several days, and don’t necessarily provide an additional discount on the Friday as opposed to Saturday or Sunday. If consumers have begun to realize this, it could be another reason why it wasn’t so busy on Friday- perhaps people are spreading out and shopping on different days. Whatever the case, I am glad that we were able to provide a safe shopping experience and that I only needed to sleep for 10 hours to recover from this year’s Black Friday

(Featured Image by Markus Spiske on Unsplash)