The day is Friday November 29th, 2019. It’s 6:40 am, slightly raining and a strong sense of tension in the air. People have begun to crowd at the entrance of a Target, some of them just now arriving there and some of them just now waking up from their tents, camping out by the entrance since the day before. “It’s out of this world,” Ty thinks, watching from the car window of the damp, crowded parking lot, just now arriving thinking he would be one of the first to be there. Though, by the looks of it, it seems to be better arriving late seeing that he hadn’t brought an umbrella having not anticipated that it was going to be raining. As the opening time gets closer, he decides that he should try to make his way closer to the doors, seeing the concerned employees watching from the main entrance as he gets out the car. A few seconds before the store opens, the crowd starts to count down, “Ten!” the crowd chants. Ty seeing the visible shock once more from the employees from inside the store. The crowd continues, “Nine! Eight! Seven! Six!” the employees ready to jump out the way as soon as the door opens. “Five! Four! Three!” Ty thinking to himself that it’s finally time, “Two! One!”
As the door opens, crowds of people rush in, some even running through the exit door clearly knowing so, competing for the best deals the store has to offer. Shoulder to shoulder, running into each other, the only thing Ty can think of, “I have to get to it first.” He rushes into Target carrying a list with only one thing on it, a TV. As he rushes through the aisles looking for the electronics sections, he sees people knocking each other over while they fight for all sorts of things ranging from pots and pans for the kitchen to vacuum cleaners and cleaning supplies. As he passes them he gets to the electronics section, with his eyes on the TVs, looking for the best one to go with his small apartment. With most of the people going for the larger one’s, he sprints over towards the back where TVs thirty-two inches and under stay. As he sees them, his eyes light up, “This is straight out of a movie,” he thinks aloud, with TVs on display, appearing to have a sort of angelic light beaming on to them. Ty stops and hesitates on which one to get, but as he hears a crowd rushing behind him, he decides on a small thirty inch, that looks more like a monitor than anything.
He then rushes back to the entrance towards the checkout, hoping that he doesn’t get knocked over by people doing the same as he’s doing. He gets to the checkout, surprised that he’s the first in line, and is greeted by a cashier who is short with long and has a name tag on her left side that says Sam. She’s surprised that this was the only thing that Ty was ringing up, but knowing how people act this time of year, she comments on how it was the right decision overall. As he pays for TV, Ty’s finally relieved, thinking, “What did I just witness,” as he exits the store, thinking back on how he had almost been trampled by a crowd of people trying to find a good deal on skillets and vacuums. He gets back in his car, already knowing that next year is going to be ten times worse than before.
The thing that inspired me to write this part of the story was hearing about all of the Black Friday stories that I’ve heard of. I’ve always found it interesting that as the years go by Black Friday gets more and more chaotic. You’d hear stories of people camping out on Thanksgiving at Walmarts or Targets or any other store that does Black Friday just to make sure that they can beat other people to the deals that they are trying to get, it had always interested me to see what other people would The reason that inspired me to write the whole story was to see if I can make a complex story that introduce many ideas of life, ranging from the struggles that we experience to all of the big or small victories that we strive to achieve in life.
My writing process while making this story is mainly focused on controlling the pacing of the story, if I wanted it to be long or short. A challenge that I faced when making this story was trying to make it more believable. Everyone knows how chaotic a Black Friday could be, there have been articles where people have got caught fighting in the store just because they took the thing that they wanted. I still wanted to use aspects of a chaotic Black Friday but I also did not want to overdo it. Another problem that I faced during the character sketch was the pacing. Since I was already going to continue on with the story later on, I didn’t know how I wanted Ty to start off as, whether he would be more confident than shy, if he was to be open to the people around him or if he would just condense his problems inside. Basically his personal thoughts, traits, and characteristics was what I struggled to come up with. I overcame that challenge by combining characteristics that are a little bit of everything, with him having a one track mind when it comes to certain things, but still tries to stay observant of what is going on around him, basically traits that are the opposite of their counterparts.