Black Friday: The drive, the crowds, the late night, the cold: ‘It’s totally worth it’

Laugh at them if you want. It's pretty easy.

They are huddled outside this place like caribou, fending off a cold so awful that it must have come from some place evil. Later, when they get inside, their fingers will tingle with the burn of 75 degrees.

But for now, they freeze. They stretch in one pulsing, frost-breathing horde from the front doors, where the guards have yellow-taped a makeshift barrier, around to the side of the store, back 100 yards or so, across the alley with the loading docks, out onto North Fifth Street, up the hill, onward another couple hundred yards, only to stop just short of the Las Vegas Beltway.

Yes. You heard us right. The line at a toy store an hour before the 10 p.m. opening on Thanksgiving night stops at the top of a freeway entrance ramp.

These people have bought ski masks and thickly lined hoodies, stolen grandma's afghan off the sofa, wrapped themselves in downed comforters and baby blankets and fleece and knit and wool, all so they can buy a Toy Story 3 Talking 14-inch U-Command Buzz Lightyear action figure that usually goes for $79.99, but on this Black Friday, it's a super bargain price of $39.99. Or maybe not Buzz. Maybe it's a scooter or a super awesome set of Legos. The Santa Sing-A-Ma-Jig doll for a Price So Hot They Can't Print It In The Ad!

Whatever.

Some people -- we're looking at you, ponytailed guy at the front of the line -- have been here for 12 hours.

Twelve hours! In bone chilling cold! For toys! In the city with the highest foreclosure rate in the country!

So, yeah, laugh at them.

But maybe also thank them. For whatever reason, this is what we have become. This, Black Friday at a store so big you could hold two football games inside, simultaneously, if you cleared out the aisles, is the front line in the battle against the Great Recession.

Black Friday is the biggest shopping day of the year, and the experts say the economy needs people to shop. That's how we roll here.

There are other front lines, too. Best Buy, Target, Fry's, Walmart. Big Box Behemoths that call to us in some mystical way that perhaps only Arthur C. Clarke would have understood.

It is these people, this guy with his Super-Mega-Tall Starbucks brand mocha whatnot and this gal with her baby wrapped up like a Sherpa, who are fighting on the front lines of the economic battle.

The man leading the charge tonight is Guillermo Calvillo, the ponytailed guy. He's a big dude, black hair, giant coat, pleasant demeanor, no sense of irony. Drove in Wednesday from California to visit his sister.

And then they got in line at Toys R Us at 10 a.m. on Thanksgiving Day.

He's getting a Netbook for $79.99 that goes for $179.99. A couple other things, too. Probably an MP3 player.

He figures he'll hit Target next.

"I'm like, 'Oh well, I'm always up late anyway,' " he says.

The closest Target is next door. There's another one five miles up the road. Another one five miles past that one. Target opens at 4 a.m. The guy in the front of the line over at the Target next door is nearly asleep. He's wearing a ski mask over his whole face. He got here at noon. That's 16 hours before it opens. There's not much of a line behind him yet. Not like the one at Toys R Us.

There, workers are like sentinels, keeping guard as they hand out 28 pages of ads and counsel folks on how to get a precious shopping cart.

"You all right?" a woman asks the security guard, who strolls by with a steaming cup of coffee.

"I'm all right," he says, breathing steam. "Are you all right? I can go get in my car anytime I want."

She laughs, and he moves on, toward the back of the line.

That's where Laura Horvath is with her niece, Brieanna Koester, and Koester's boyfriend, Adrian Torres.

They just got here, 9:30 p.m. They're laughing their heads off for no particular reason.

They're going to get toys. Bargain-priced toys.

Horvath has two kids, 9 and 7.

"It's totally worth it," she says. You save a lot of money. She did last year, when she snagged two MP3 players for $30. That's $30 for both of them, mind you.

Bargain!

But really? It's worth this? The cold and the late night and the crowd and the drive and all that?

"Looking back on how much I got, how much I saved, yeah. Totally worth it," she says.

OK then.

No, wait, it's not OK. This cannot simply be about saving money, can it? You can do that online now. You can just wait until next year, when it's cheaper. You can get something else, for goodness sakes, something that doesn't cost so darn much in the first place. You can just put the 30 bucks into the kid's college fund and buy them something fun at the 99 cent store.

Kids love Silly Putty.

Can't you do that? Can't you skip this madness? Can't you resist the allure, the magic, the battle call, just this once?

"Whether people like it or not," says Torres, as if he's apologizing, "this is a social event."

And there you have it. Black Friday is no longer just a shopping event, where you wake up at a normal hour, hit the mall at lunchtime, get a bargain on a sweater and grab a pretzel on your way out to the car.

Black Friday is its own Social Event, complete with capital letters.

Which is probably why no one out here has complained that Black Friday actually starts on Thursday now.

That's how we roll.

Contact reporter Richard Lake at rlake@review
journal.com or 702-383-0307.