This time of year is when the mall gets really busy, but the busiest day of them all will remain Black Friday. Black Friday is the day after Thanksgiving, in which people tend to shop for the holiday season. On this day, stores have the best sales of the year and open at ridiculous hours. Hours that I think we should all be sleeping or spending time with our family. As the employee of one of these stores, it is the day we all prepare for.

I work in a clothes store called Express and this year Black Friday was a big deal. The store’s sale actually began on the Tuesday before Black Friday with the biggest sale yet. We were taking fifty percent off every single item in the store until Friday at noon. I had not expected the sale to begin that early in the week and I did not find out until I clocked in for the day.

I did our daily cleaning routine and by the time we opened, we had several customers already browsing the store. It wasn’t a super busy morning, but for a Tuesday, there was a lot more traffic than usual.

Last year I opened with the store and arrived about fifteen minutes early. As we were preparing for the opening at midnight, we noticed the crowd behind the gate was getting bigger and bigger. My manager asked me to unravel some tangled necklaces and was counting down the minutes until we opened. Finally, when I finished, our manager said that she was going to open the gate.

The crowd rushed in; some people even ran.  The store was so crammed that I couldn’t get through from one room to another to do stock-checks. It took more than five minutes just to get from one end of the store to the other.

Customers would stop me midway to ask questions about our promo, or about their sizes. I also closed with the store and all I remember are huge piles of clothes, as if someone had just done laundry and it was time to fold all of it.

The entire store was flipped upside down. Not one thing was the way it should be. We didn’t clock off until about 3 a.m. Saturday morning.

Although this year we opened at 10 p.m. on Thanksgiving, I wasn’t scheduled to work until Friday at 1 p.m. As I was getting off of Highway 99 onto Ming, I noticed that Ming was already so busy. I began to feel a little nervous about whether or not I would make it in time for my shift. Thankfully, I made it on time.

When I checked in with my manager she asked to me to cashier for someone else who was going on break. From then on, I was pretty much there for the rest of my shift. Normally, in between customers, we process go-backs and pick up a little, or fold some clothes, but there was absolutely no time for that.

We had a nonstop line. She asked me to remember a man with a gray hoodie who indicated the last customer to receive the fifty percent off because he was in line by noon. After him, the sale changed to only forty percent off. Some customers were handed little red passes that gave them an extra two hours to shop the fifty percent off sale. After two hours of cashiering, I took my break and enjoyed great food other employees brought in for the potluck. By the time I came back from my break, we were still just as busy and I remained cashier for the rest of my shift.