Black Friday gives holiday shopping a black eye

Written by Cindy Nevitt Friday, November 23, 2012 11:03 am

Ocean City Unfiltered

Today is one of the year’s two biggest shopping days. In fact, Black Friday, acknowledged as the official start of the Christmas shopping season, arrived in stores so many hours ago it was still Thursday.

Before many turkeys were even served on Thanksgiving Day, some even bigger turkeys camped out in the cold in tents on sidewalks outside big-box stores for the chance to be first at the biggest sales.

Also, if history repeats itself, to be first to be pepper sprayed or knifed or shot by some unhinged shopper who values the $179.99 price tag on a 40-inch plasma TV more than the life of his fellow man.

There is a reason the big sales items are called “door busters.” Don’t know? Just refer to the video from Walmart a few years ago, when a security guard unlocked the front doors to a store and was trampled to death by people intent on scoring a deal in the electronics department.

Yeah, I’m not doing that. There’s no way I care enough about a Wii to take part in a melee.

My day-after Thanksgiving, or the day after the day after Thanksgiving, is likely to be spent far from the mall-crazed madness. Since the time my son was 2 months old, we’ve visited Inner Harbor in Baltimore over the Thanksgiving weekend. He’s 21 now, and the only time in all those years we failed to make the trip was two years ago when I was working a truly dreadful seasonal job and my daughter was too afraid to ask her passive aggressive bully of a boss for a day off.

Visiting Santa at his white twinkle light-outlined glass house on the water in Baltimore is the longest-standing tradition we have in my household. The practice of my children sitting on Santa’s lap long ago went the way of Santa’s petting zoo, which featured actual “reindeer” pawing the straw strewn on the sidewalk until some organization decreed it inhumane, illegal or unsanitary, but we still make the trip.

It’s part sentiment, part habit, part shopping trip, part cultural experience, part feeding frenzy.

Baltimore is Edgar Allan Poe’s hometown, and the horror writer extraordinaire is buried within walking distance of Lexington Market, the oldest continually operating market in America. It is located off the beaten path, away from Inner Harbor and its pan-handlers, in a part of the city that isn’t safe by daylight and really isn’t safe after nightfall.

But the crab cakes at Faidley’s at the Lexington Market are Baltimore’s best, and the lack of ambience in the place only adds to its charm. Around the periphery of the store, skinned and displayed on ice, are muskrats and some of their unfortunate brethren. The octogenarian owner of the second-generation family business has to climb a ladder to the loft where his office is located. The floor is dangerously uneven. There are no chairs at the stand-up tables, the better to hurry you along.

It’s distinctly un-fancy, which makes it a genuine experience vs. a “dining experience,” and the baseball-sized jumbo lump crab cakes are the highlight of our annual trip.

The rest of the day might be spent at the Baltimore Aquarium or the Maryland Science Center in Inner Harbor. Shopping is kept to a minimum as it seems half of the stores are stocked with Ravens and Orioles merchandise and the other half stocked with T-shirts bearing slightly suggestive slogans about hard-shell crabs. The gigantic Barnes & Noble bookstore is good for idling away a few hours before dinner and the drive home.

Taking a day over the Thanksgiving weekend to take a trip to Baltimore doesn’t help us get a jump on our Christmas shopping, but we don’t get jumped by a Black Friday zealot either. That’s reason enough to continue the tradition.