Editor’s Note: Boyette is a current employee with Circuit City.Every year after Thanksgiving, families wake up from their tryptophan-induced comas at inhumane hours. At the same time, employees working at retail stores are also waking and preparing to be overcome by families beginning another Christmas shopping season. Many of us understand the feeling of waking in the early morning hours. However, waking to customers who are wired from three cups of coffee, cold from waiting for two hours outside and angry that their advertised products are sold out is something much fewer of us can relate. The excitement seen in a child’s face when he receives his first iPod on Christmas morning is surpassed only by his mother’s adrenaline as she rips that very iPod from another mother’s hands on Black Friday.I’ve seen the faces of these mothers first hand at Circuit City, and I expect to see some new faces this coming Friday. What these mothers don’t know is that Black Friday serves only to push most major retail chains further into bankruptcy.A common misconception about Black Friday is that companies make a lot of money on this particular day, when in fact that’s not always the case. Many retail chains use this time to rid themselves of old stock in place of the new. Their method is simple — they lower the price well below its normal retail price to increase demand. Clothing stores, for example, can still effectively make a profit because the wholesale price of the product is significantly less than retail. Alternately, the products sold at your local electronics retailer have a much higher initial cost to the company, thus reducing the profit margins by many orders of magnitude.Large electronics retailers like Best Buy and Circuit City have had to reduce margins by as much as 10 percent in order to compete with online stores, especially on computer sales. An Internet retailer doesn’t have to pay for brick-and-mortar or nearly the number of employees to sustain business, enabling them to afford the price breaks they offer. This problem is only exacerbated on Black Friday when these stores have to lower their prices even more to give the appearance of a deal.So why would a company participate in Black Friday if it isn’t profitable? The same could be ask of a company that pays a portion of its profits to their stockholders even as the company starts to fail. One answer is consistency. If a stock holder trusts a company to pay a dividend, that trust can easily be lost if a company does not meet those expectations. Retailers are expected to participate in Black Friday. Without their participation, retailers appear unconcerned with the customers’ needs — a lower price. Customers are sensitive to when businesses appear unconcerned, and this decreases consumer loyalty. An evident lack of care will make consumers weary and will heavily affect retailers’ success this holiday season.Send in your thoughts on Black Friday to [email protected].