If you're a kung fu shopper, today is a really good day for you

What's the very worst day of the year?

Certainly there are people who would say April 15th, the day income tax is due.

A lot of kids would say it's the first day of school, the end of summer's freedom and the start of nine months of tedium.

Not me.

Walmart, 2015

To me, the worst day of the year is, well, it's today.

The day after Thanksgiving.

Black Friday.

The day lower middle class America gets up in the middle of the night, gets in line at Walmarts from coast to coast and looks for Christmas shopping bargains.

The day after Thanksgiving is the traditional start of the season, and the term "Black Friday" supposedly came because it was the day many retail businesses went into profit -- "into the black" -- for the year.


Of course now Christmas shopping season starts when the last trick or treater leaves your porch. In another ten or twenty years the sales will start as soon as the last firecracker fizzles out on the Fourth of July.

It seems almost quaint to remember a time when people went out the day after Thanksgiving to get their first glimpse of that year's Christmas displays. When I was young and we lived in Ohio, the great Columbus department store Lazarus would close on Thanksgiving and reopen the next day fully decorated for Christmas.

I'll never forget the one month every year when Lazarus's sixth floor became a massive Toyland complete with Santa Claus. The same month that Lazarus (and Rike's in Dayton) did their wonderful window displays.

Up after Thanksgiving, down by New Year's.

It's amazing for people under 50 to realize that once was the time we had well-defined seasons. Not only Christmas, but summer as well. Kids got out of school around Memorial Day and went back just after Labor Day.

Who could believe that the only way President Roosevelt could get people to start their Christmas shopping earlier was to shift Thanksgiving temporarily from the fourth Thursday in November to the third.

Americans being traditionalists, there were actually a lot of people who complained about the decision.

These days there are no traditions. People do whatever they want whenever they want, and you're just as likely to see someone Christmas shopping in August as in December.

But Black Friday is the worst, and it wouldn't be too far wrong to call it a sign of a dystopian America. In 2002, the first time I covered Black Friday as a reporter, I showed up at a Walmart in Upland, California, at 5 a.m. The store was scheduled to open at 6 a.m. and there were already 1,500 people in line.

Later that same morning, I headed a few miles east to the giant outlet mall Ontario Mills. The Mills had a parking lot big enough to handle the entire population of Wyoming, and it was completely filled.

The parking lot, not Wyoming.

If there's one thing true about shopping -- even Christmas shopping -- it's that you shouldn't have to die to get the presents you want.

But between 2002 and 2012, 136 people died shopping on Black Friday, 41 of them from being trampled. The only surprising number was that two people apparently died from being hit by barbecue.

It had to have been ribs, not pulled pork.

There were also two people strangled, but I've got to think that might have been someone using Black Friday as a cover for crimes that would have happened anyway.

Things have changed a little the last few years. Numerous businesses now open in the evening on Thanksgiving and stay open all night, and about 30 percent of all Christmas shopping is now dome on the Internet.

You can still die shopping on the Internet, but you're probably not going to be trampled, pepper sprayed or hit by barbecue.

That's progress, I suppose.