I can’t believe that my dear husband, who suffers from “crowd-o-phobia” actually took me shopping on Black Friday.  It just proves that nobody is immune to a good sale.

Pittsburgh, whence comes this Black Friday article, is really no different from anywhere else in these United States. I remember when growing up, my brother of blessed memory and myself were told by our parents that the Friday after Thanksgiving was simply a strange ritual in which Christians had some sort of mob-fever, and if we stood out of downtown Boston and the bigger shopping centers, as a family, probably nobody would get hurt. Now, shopping seems to have a fervor previously reserved only for religion.  I think this year is the first time I ever heard the term “Black Friday” which I think is a perverse one and sounds rather too goth for my taste. Rest assured that people have spent a lot of money on the study of applied psychology of what makes people buy things.  After all, people who sell things for a living have a highly vested interest, even though I have heard of nothing but enormous margins in retail sales, and this article insists they are small. Read more on Shopping And Gifting — A Substitute For Sex?…