CARLTON FLETCHER: As made-up holidays go, Black Friday was a real bust

“So I’m out here standing in the sunrise, With a case of the early morning shakes.”

— Whiskey Meyers

Let us all take a moment to remember the passing of another made-up American “holiday.”

It seemed only yesterday that, as the real Thanksgiving holiday neared, American shoppers started creating strategic plans, scraping all the change out of couch cushions and looking through circulars and store advertisements for looming Black Friday specials.

Now? Eehh … that’s so 2015.

You remember Black Friday, right? It was the made-up holiday retailers came up with — and you just know somebody got paid a boatload of money for that moment of clarity — to make women and teenagers believe that they could get the most super-duper bargains ever if they just forgot about sleep on Thanksgiving Day — or took a non tryptophan-induced nap right after lunch — and came out in the earliest hours of the morning to shop. Never mind that there might be one or two actual bargains that would be worth getting up early for if you could be one of the first one or two in line … that’s how many of the Black Friday specials stores usually had on hand.

(Oh, and that thing up there about women and teenagers? Before you get your knickers in a twist, I’d venture a guess about 99.9 percent of Black Friday shoppers were women, teens, or a few henpecked men who were dragged out of bed at some ungodly hour to walk around and tote packages when they should have been home sleeping.)

Probably the No. 1 thing about Black Friday that stirred up the country was watching videos of idiots who ran people over, crashed down doors and got into fights over the three or four bargains that stores offered. If you like nostalgia, go online and type “Black Friday riots” into your browser. You can spend several hours watching some rotund woman who looks like an NFL linebacker toss a petite fellow shopper around like a rag doll as they scramble for the buy-one-get-one-free items. Seeing the fright on employees’ eyes as they’re stampeded by the crush of shoppers also is a delight.

(The No. 2 thing about Black Friday that was a bad thing, at least for Classic rock fans, was the use by a prominent retailer of AC/DC’s “Back in Black” in its ad campaign to mark the season. Rockers came running in the room, threw up rock ‘n’ roll horns and played air guitar to the familiar riff and the screaming, “Back in blacccckkkk!” … intro for the first 20 or so times the spot aired on TV. Soon, though, even the most gung-ho classic rocker had sickened of the constant airing of the bit of the song that played over and over and over. Word is, the Australian band had to cancel the American leg of its world tour that particular year to allow for a post-”Back in Black” cooling off period.)

Now, though, Black Friday has itself been relegated to the oldies bin of holidays. It really wasn’t much of a surprise, what with people now ordering pretty much everything — food, clothes, medical diagnoses, nuclear weapons — online, especially since COVID-19 gave them an excuse not to get up out of their recliners and do … well, anything. The youngest two generations of American consumers are oblivious to such quaint notions as “customer service,” “trying on garments to see if they actually fit,” “paying less than $50 for a meal with all the delivery and delivery service fees added on.”

Now advertisers are using such pitches as “a month of Black Fridays,” “every day is Black Friday,” “Black Friday apps” and “special Black Friday delivery fees” to get customers to whip out their phones and order something they would never impulse buy in a store, and usually in colors that look nothing like the colors you actually order.

So when you wake up at 3 a.m. on the day after Thanksgiving morning and wonder what that strange noise was … it was just the silence of America’s shoppers … sleeping in.