Black Friday starts early

The last few years the big retailers have been opening up at 5AM or earlier offering "door buster deals" but they decided that wasn't good enough with many of them opening the doors at midnight or earlier on Thanksgiving Day. I can't imagine going to work or shopping after my triptophan induced coma. We watched the Lady Ga Ga special when I woke up.

I know that many stores make a big chunk of their yearly profits in the Christmas shopping season but this is ridiculous. The local news have stories about people camping out waiting for the doors to open then showing the rush. This will only encourage the big box stores to shit all over their employees. No wonder Occupy Wall Street has hit a nerve.

An employee of Target collected 200,000 signatures on a petition asking the company to roll back its Black Friday shopping hours but the corporate mouthpiece said no go because the shoppers demanded that they open at midnight. She added the the company big wigs would also be in the office early. Expect this guy to be fired in a couple of months on some "unrelated issue". The human toll not only includes the loss of family time.

PAHOKEE, Fla. -- A woman coming home from working her early-morning Black Friday shift at Target fell asleep at the wheel and drove into a canal, Palm Beach Sheriff's deputies said Friday.

Pure Bunkum sums it nicely with tongue firmly in cheek: Finally, the stores get us.
We want Thanksgiving out of the way as fast as possible. It’s a nuisance holiday standing between us and our Christmas shopping.


Mrs. G wanted to drag me out shopping today, I'd rather eat glass. I'm not going to deal with this nonsense

Black Friday sales start with pepper spray stampede

But few can have expected even the most determined of bargain-hunters to adopt the brutal tactics of one female shopper in a Los Angeles suburb who attacked her rivals with pepper-spray: a substance more recently associated with police brutality against Occupy Wall Street protesters...At least 20 people, including several children, were injured as the woman deployed her weapon....

This reminds me of the famous Zayre's Cabbage Patch Riot

THERE'S A RIOT GOIN ON: IN THE CABBAGE PATCH

They consequently caused consumer mayhem like in the above video clip from 1983 when a riot at Zayre's department store in Wilkes-Barre, PA broke out in which shoppers had limbs broken and teeth knocked out-- all in an effort to get to these "adoptable" lil creatures

The Blogfather had a few posts about the riot when he was writing Wilkes-Barre Online

The market speaks to Bank of America

And BoA listened.

Bank of America earned over $6 Billion in the 3rd Quarter but a hidden revenue stream has been stiffled by the Dodd-Frank Act so they had to go out in the open and announce that they were going to whack debit cards users with a $5 monthly fee to make up for it. Customers resisted and the bank has backed down. I said in an earlier post that the $5 fee was a good thing because the big banks would have to put their fee schedules up front instead of hiding them.

That doesn't mean that they won't try to squeeze their cusomers in other ways.

Banks likely to try range of new fees

Consumers should prepare for even higher checking and overdraft charges, analysts said. If they use another bank’s automatic teller machine, they may well get hit with higher ATM fees. And if they want to receive paper statements in the mail, they may end up paying for that, too.

The Occupy Wall Street movement started getting media attention right after Bank of America announced the $5 fee. Most people don't know the in's and out's of financial policy but they know when they know when they are getting screwed. The TARP program was probably necessary but we don't have to like it. In my mind to big to fail should mean to big to exsist. The anti-trust laws seem to be a thing of the past.

Bank Of America Derivatives Timebomb Shows System Is Corrupt To The Core

If regulators were doing their jobs properly, banks would not be allowed to engage in massive speculation through derivatives trading. The near meltdown of the financial system in 2008 has resulted in thousands of pages of new regulations but has done nothing to reign in “too big to fail banks” or reduce systemic risk in the financial system.

Local banks and credit unions welcome the opprotunity to attract new customers.

Smaller financial institutions were promoting "Bank Transfer Day" on Nov. 5