My sister, aunt and I, all Red Hanger sale veterans, went Black Friday shopping last year. South Africans of a certain age will remember the infamous Red Hanger Sale, an end-of-year sale that Edgars, a local high street store used to run yearly. That’s where we cut our teeth. Any self respecting sale lover knows that the cheaper a fashion find is, the more thrilling it is. It is for this reason that as the Black Friday season approaches, we laugh at the prices big national chain stores are charging for what’s on our lists. Laugh at their faces, I say. The kind of prices we were looking for could only be found in one place so we left the suburbs and headed to the Johannesburg CBD.
We had an itinerary. Jeppe Street, China City, Bree Street and Small Street to mention a few haunts in Jozi. ETA? One hour or so before opening time. The level of anality about leaving early enough involved wake-up calls within the group an hour or so before the agreed leaving time. In our handbags, we had a set amount of cash to avoid being seduced by prices into spending much more money than planned, a lesson learnt from previous sales. There could only be one manual for this kind of Black Friday operation, 101 Ways to Deal With Any Calamity. Amongst other advice, this manual involves stepping on small children to bag that out-of-reach beautiful top. When we got there, we realised that the whole of Johannesburg had the same plan.
The electricity went down in China City, our first stop, prompting the stall owners to ask order shoppers to leave out of concerns about shoplifting. We spent an hour waiting to pay for our hard fought for wares in a sweltering store full of employees that were rushed off their feet on Pine Avenue. Because this is the thing about cut-price speciality shops. The reason prices are so reasonable is that you are not being charged for *optional extras* like customer service. As far as these folk are concerned, they are doing you a favour and the problem could only be that you are a leech that’s not pulling its weight in this transaction. We could all tell that something was amiss, maybe the paying electronic system was down, but no-one was admitting anything. A bashful store assistant came around halfway into our second hour in the queue to inform us that pregnant women and women with children could skip the line. Which is when my sister admitted defeat and left the queue to take a seat near the one fan on the whole floor. Dehydration and passing out were concerns. Thirty minutes later, we also gave up the fight and went to lick our wounds at a nearby restaurant. That just about made up for the slight tarnishing of our collective sale queen tiaras
Disclaimer: So I might have said something along the lines of never shopping in bargain price clothes shops again after watching *that* documentary on the sourcing practices of the UK high street chain, Primark, a while back. All I can say is that I am really broke right now and the clothes were really nice. In addition, I plan to help elderly folk cross roads, rescue cats from trees and to do many other saintly deeds over the next few months to rebalance the karmic scales.