This Thanksgiving, I am thankful that whoever made up Black Friday is (hopefully) rotting in his grave right about now. Sure, it was a good idea in theory: “Let’s have all stores give discounts on mediocre items on a single day during the year to draw out enough customers to help these stores add billions of dollars to their year-end profits. Everybody wins, right?” Wrong. In practice, Black Friday is nothing but crazy people, lame deals and having to listen to “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” about a billion times in a single day.

So you get to your local mall around 11 a.m., and what amazing deals you find! American Eagle is generously granting 14 percent off the sale price of any fleece in the store — oh golly, now you can get it for $34.40 instead of $39.99! Of course, the only problem that remains is finding anything in the store that even remotely resembles a fleece, as it looks like the early shoppers have left American Eagle a barren ground of bedrock and rubble. Of course, you only have yourself to blame. Had you arrived at the store at 5 a.m., maybe you could have managed to snag that last fleece.

Victoria’s Secret is having a five for $25 sale on Pink underwear. Not that they don’t already do this every other day of the year. No, Black Friday is ultra special, as you will never on any other day see a group of young women and old hags alike wrestle over the only (size XX-small) thong still remaining in order to complete their set of five panties and get the sought-after discount.

Looks like H&M ran out of V-neck sweaters, so what did they put on the rack labeled “V-neck sweaters, 6 percent off?” Plaid mini skirts. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t have a problem with plaid mini skirts (which are apparently plenty in stock for the spring, just to give you a heads up), but mini skirts probably aren’t what you had in mind while battling snow flurries and sub-zero degree weather to get to the mall this morning.

Of course, what makes the Black Friday shopping experience oh-so-extraordinary is that pesky group of heavy, middle-aged, bargain-shopping women that seem to follow you around no matter where you go. Just when it seems like you’ve found the one store where you can hide from them, within seconds the place becomes swarmed. Like vultures, they rip clothing off the shelves, dismembering it with their talons, drooling on the fabric and then tossing it aside and trampling over the mounds of dead carcasses. Beware, for these beasts use their child-birthing hips, beer-bellies, oversized behinds and humongous thighs as weapons in deterring their competitors. One swing of the monster’s hip can knock an average-sized person unconscious.

That being said, I hope that everybody had a good Thanksgiving with lots of turkey … and that, with any luck, you were all smart enough to do your Christmas shopping online this Black Friday.

— Polina Deryuga is a sophomore management and pre-law major. From now on, she will try to avoid shopping anywhere from Black Friday until about a month after Christmas, thank you very much.