Brown Thursday

Hours:  Mon, Tue, Wed :  6 am - 4 pm

             Thanksgiving    :  5 am - 10 am and returning 5 pm - Midnight

              Friday               :  7 am - 4 pm

I'm not sure the average retail shopper understands just what a retail worker endures in order to get things ready for the Holiday shopping needs.  There are some very long days needed to make sure that all of the things that will be on "special" are opened and ready to purchase.  A Keurig machine doesn't arrive in a store in the beautiful shiny box that you see.  Rather, it arrives in a cardboard box stuffed into a trailer with what seems like a million other cardboard boxes; each must be unloaded from the trailer, sorted and separated, then each cardboard box is opened and the product is restacked so that it can be sold to consumers.  (well, there's a lot involved, but that's it in a nutshell)

By the time the actual shopping day arrives, your retail worker has already been working long, hard hours preparing for a nice shopping experience.  Which really boils down to this:  When 6 pm arrives on Brown Thursday, all we want is for customers to do their shopping nicely, politely;  if you're looking for something in particular, we'll smile and help you as much as we can.  But don't expect us to perform miracles - or worse, treat us like we're incompetent when your needs aren't met. 

That being said, this year's retail sale at my BigBox Store went rather smoothly, with no incidents being reported.  For that, we were very happy!!  Especially me, because I was part of the team that walked around with a first aid kit and all that goes with it, policing the people to keep things moving when they tended to bog up and block traffic in the main aisles.  Just walking around and smiling at people all night was a very tiresome 9 hours!   I accumulated 23k steps just on Thanksgiving Day alone!  (I usually walk a lot for my job and track my steps daily, but this week I'm 22% above my usual weekly average!) 

I hope all of you enjoyed your Thanksgiving Day celebrations, and if you were one of the millions of shoppers, I hope you got everything on your list.  If you didn't, check out the deals for Cyber Monday -- from the comfort of your home!   I bought myself a new computer monitor, but my computer is old enough that it doesn't have an HDMI output, so I need to find a special doohickey to make it work!  Wish me luck out in the shopping world! 

PS:  After the week I had, I came home and crawled into bed at 5:30pm Friday night, and didn't get up until 7am the next morning!