I managed to avoid Black Friday for the first 20 years of my life. It was one of those things I had read about in newspaper inserts and seen on the news. As a young teenager, I remember asking my parents to “please take me to the sales!” The response was always something along the lines of, “You don’t want to do that, there are too many people.” But that’s what excited me: that and the amazing price cuts and buy-one-get-one-frees. So last year I went. I woke up with my sister at 4 a.m. and went to Morehead City’s largest shopping area, Cypress Bay. Once there, we had to decide to stand in line at Best Buy or Belk, the only two stores worth shopping at, and ultimately settled on Belk, since Best Buy’s line was about a mile long. After 30 minutes of freezing our butts off, we got inside where a nice, exhausted looking Belk employee gave us each a free gift card with a surprise amount of money on it. That surprise was to the tune of five measley dollars. Oh, and there were so many people there it was hard to move. And on top of that, Morehead City’s Belk is worthless and I ended up with nothing but a 50 percent off bra. Merry effing Christmas. By 6:15 a.m. we were both back home, in bed. There’s no way around it. Black Friday is miserable. Too many people pack into too little space. Too many over-inflated, over-advertised deals that don’t deliver. Too much hype. Too little sleep. I know I’m not going out there again, and I would advise the entire world to not participate, but in this economy, I’d feel guilty doing that. Retail sales went down 2.8% in October, which is the biggest drop since someone started keeping records of such things in 1992, according to the Wall Street Journal. November isn’t likely to be much better, if the Dow is any indicator.It seems that retailers are still holding out hope for Black Friday, though. I’ve seen a multitude of advertisements on every network and cable TV station and The News & Observer is heavy with inserts. Bfads.net is loaded with promotional and sale information from Walmart, Banana Republic, GameStop, Best Buy and a few dozen others.  It’s like the retailers have one last shot at ending 2008 in the black. (Interestingly, an increase in sales is not the origin of the name — it actually comes from a 1960s Philadelphia Police Department term for the bad traffic on that day.) I doubt that all retailers will experience a huge increase in profits. An informal survey of people in the Technician office indicates that about 50 percent of people are expecting a smaller Christmas haul this year because of the economy. My own mother has told me two or three times, “Now, don’t expect too much this year.” And seriously, when the Dow is dipping below 7,000 and our government is talking about more than $1 trillion of economic bailouts and stimulus packages, how many people are going to rush the stores at 5 a.m.? Even if things are on sale, I know I’m not super-gung-ho-excited about spending money right now. Are you? Send in your thoughts on Black Friday to [email protected].