So I did the thing I said I'd never do again, which is get up at 5:40 in the morning for Black Friday. In my defense it was for one specific item and I told myself I'd be out of the store in fifteen minutes. I was there for fifty-five.
The item was a router. Not glamorous, I know. My Linksys has been dropping the 5GHz band every couple of days since September and I'd finally hit the point where rebooting it every morning before coffee stopped being charming and started being a personality flaw. There was a doorbuster on a dual-band model for under thirty bucks and I decided that was worth losing sleep over. It was, barely.
What actually stuck with me wasn't the router aisle, it was walking past the console section on the way there. Two weeks ago this was the most contested real estate in the store: the PS4 came out November 15th, Xbox One followed on the 22nd, and both were basically vapor the second they hit shelves. I half expected Black Friday to be some kind of console bloodbath, people camping out, the whole spectacle. Instead the shelf just had a hand-written sign taped to it that said "PS4 - SOLD OUT, check back soon" in the kind of marker that tells you an employee has written that sign about six times already this week. No doorbuster stampede for something that isn't there. Kind of anticlimactic honestly, and also kind of funny that the biggest hardware launch of the year and the biggest shopping day of the year landed two weeks apart and basically canceled each other out.
I did overhear one employee tell a guy that they'd had exactly four Xbox Ones come in that morning and three were already claimed by people who'd been in line since 4am. The guy just said "of course" and walked off toward TVs instead, which felt like the most honest reaction to modern retail I witnessed all day.
While I was standing in the world's slowest checkout line I made the mistake of opening Twitter, and my feed was full of people losing their minds over bitcoin, which had apparently pushed past $1,000 on Mt. Gox sometime in the last day or two. A thousand dollars. I remember when people on forums were annoyed it wouldn't clear a dollar. I don't own any and I'm not going to pretend I have some sophisticated read on whether this is a bubble or the future of money, but I will say the timing was funny — half the internet arguing about whether a router deal was worth waking up for, and the other half watching an asset apparently worth more than a car double in value over a couple weeks. Two totally different flavors of financial anxiety happening in the same three-hour window.
Anyway, the checkout line. This is my actual complaint of the day: self-checkout was open, had zero people using it, and the cashier kept directing the line toward two regular registers instead. I get that self-checkout terminals jam up if too many people use them badly, but there is no universe where making forty people wait behind two registers while four self-checkout kiosks sit empty is the correct call. I said something mild about it to the guy behind me and he just shrugged like this was a fact of life he'd made peace with years ago. Maybe he has. I have not.
Got the router home, plugged it in, and it's been fine so far — no dropped connections, though it's been all of six hours so ask me again next week. Also grabbed a $12 phone case I didn't need because it was right there at the register and my willpower had already been spent on the router line. That's basically how every Black Friday goes for me. You go in for one thing, you leave having also bought a phone case you'll lose within a month, and you swear you're never doing this again until next November when you inevitably do.
The PS4 shelf sign is still bugging me a little. There's something almost poetic about the biggest console launch in years getting completely eclipsed by its own supply chain, right on the one day of the year built entirely around buying stuff.