My mom is always excited to see me around the holidays. I live one town over but my school and work schedule makes it difficult to stay connected. So when we do finally find time to meet up, my mom likes to go on adventures. In the evening of Thanksgiving this year, we found ourselves at a Walmart as part of the pre-Black Friday insanity.

My mom decided she wanted to get Brave on blu-ray for cheap, so she was willing to enter the frenzy for a movie. Initially I wasn’t going to tag along, but I found myself curious just how bad it would be. It was worse than I anticipated.

Roughly thirty minutes after the store opened we arrived to a completely full parking lot. Cars were double-parked in red zones, shittily parked so people couldn’t get in or out and there were even a few on the sidewalks. In short, zero fucks were given. Once I got inside it was just a sea of cliché Walmart shoppers. It was just everyone from the People of Walmart website at the same time (http://www.peopleofwalmart.com).

I’m usually pretty good in crowds as a frequent concertgoer, but this collection of people was unbearable. Most people either still smelled strongly of Thanksgiving food, while others just straight up smelled like stress sweat and BO. And in this smelly crowd, people just kept their eyes on whatever dumb thing they wanted and shoved through people to get to it.

I’m surprised that any Black Friday shoppers found anything they were looking for. It was clear that there was a plan in place to enable customers to find the products they wanted, but this system was destroyed by the time we got there. Employees were clearly at wit’s end from all of this. A customer wanted to know where some item was and a floor clerk said, “Girl, I don’t know where the fuck anything is anymore! Some bitch just asked me the same thing.”

My mom decided that we should get my dad Black Ops, so I was sent to wait in a line for the game case that wrapped around the electronic section. Lucky for me, right behind me in line was a very impatient woman who was clearly a Black Friday veteran. I saw her minutes before in a completely different section cutting through people with ease and snatching up movies as people were reaching for them. She came with a plan that night. Having to wait in line was not in her plan nor was it something she did well. As the line slowly moved, she tried to get on her toes and look over people to see the game case. From where we were, you could be on a ladder and still not see it, but she remained persistent. Every few minutes she’d be on the phone with the someone complaining about their respective line experience at different Walmarts. While on her phone, she seemed unable to control the four Furbys that she held in her hand. They would either rub my ass (which felt a little nice), or she would jam the corners into my back. My final experience with her before getting the game and getting the hell out of there, was when she began to have a coughing fit for no reason. I felt the hair on the back of my head move and I realized that her hands were full so there was no way that she was covering her mouth. That lady, worst human.

I call her the worst human only because I was the direct subject of her Black Friday stupidity, but the entire crowd was made of people like her. To my knowledge, no one was hurt at my local Walmart over the past few days, but it’s all still such a bummer. The Pre-Christmas shopping season is now a part of Thanksgiving Day. If this is something that remains constant and stores open earlier and earlier to outdo one another, Thanksgiving will be taken over completely. It will become a day of people decided if they are going to stay in and enjoy the Thanksgiving tradition they have created with their families, or ditch these families to a cheap TV.

No deal is worth having to put up with those shopper types, to me anyway. My mom did succeed in getting Brave, but if this text conveys her feelings at all, I don’t think she felt it was worth it either.