Black Friday was a rumble of violent louts as usual, as shoppers desperate for deals battled it out for items with fists-a-flying, mace-a-spraying, and stun-guns-a-shocking. (<Hey, maybe they could add that stuff to the song: “The 12 Days of Christmas”?) But for all the chaos, violence and mayhem, sales were no higher than last year. Oh, but not so for Cyber Monday, where online shoppers bought a record $2 Billion worth of crap. Um, I mean, uh, stuff: stuff. They bought more stuff than ever before. And you know what that means, right? It’s the demise of Black Friday, conquered and vanquished as it has been by Cyber Monday, the triumphant sale of the Christmas season!
But while it’s clear that retailers can make lots more sales and loads more money through online sales, where shoppers log on and browse peacefully, rather than claw and trounce each other, destroying stock and injuring employees, shifting completely online will lose the traditional flavor of the year’s biggest shopping day, where everyone tries to stampede and assault each other for savings in a venal display of selfishness and greed (after all, that’s the American way!). And it’s that effort and battle which causes people to really appreciate the savings, because they’ve earned them, rather than just having the savings handed out for nothing. And in order for Cyber Monday to really become an appropriate tradition, it’s going to have to have a bit of the original battle flavor of Black Friday.
And that’s why I think I have the solution to make Cyber Monday have the feel of our traditional holiday sale struggle: make customers battle over online deals in a multi-player video game where they must win the savings through vicious combat. This would be the multi-player online version of the Black Friday video game I suggested two years ago Thanksgiving, but rather than being simply a video game people could buy and play at home on their X-Box and PlayStation and Wii consoles, it would be mandatory for shoppers to engage in the carnage-filled brutality in order to get the savings they want on the items they’re buying. And the only way to avoid having to play this violent video game of materialistic subjugation would be to enter a code proving that you shopped on Cyber Monday last year, showing you were thinking ahead as a refined, civilized, computer-savvy individual, so you deserve not to have to fight for your deals against an army of GWAR-esque battle-hardened venal-violence mercenaries. (Or I suppose you could simply opt out, which would naturally require each shopper’s online avatar to run a gauntlet of deadly assassins seeking to prevent them from doing so with ferocious combat and a pernicious, sadistic array of Indiana Jones-style tomb death traps.)
Here’s my original Black Friday video game post from two Thanksgivings ago (I beat a number of TV shows to this idea by a few days):
