Longer store hours. Cheaper prices. After Thanksgiving, television viewers are bombarded with advertisements for Black Friday. Late night, after one Thanksgiving dinner, every other commercial I watched was for Walmart. Their theme song, Back In Black, played over and over. And that’s just the beginning.

Past midnight, people pack into their local stores to indulge their insatiable shopping craze. The lines. The crowds. The competition. It’s not something you are typically surrounded by. Buyers violently frenzy through the doors to save on what they think are the best deals.

Will it be enough for everyone? Are great deals really getting pumped out in spades?
And at the end of the day, is it all worth it?

When customers start piling into stores around 1:00 AM, they all have the same motive: gotta’ save on those clothes, or that toy, or this Xbox. When they finally find that something that their looking for, one might think, “This is too good to be true.” And they might just be right.

Fox news publicized that the deals you get only seem good because the prices are cut down on Black Friday-to what they should be at the beginning of the year. That’s right; in preparation for the holidays, most stores raise their prices and drop them just in time. It’s a dirty trick that’s been trending with most retailers, but people like seeing that pretty 50% off tag no matter what, right? So are you really scoring a Black Friday deal, or are the retailers just tricking you into purchasing something you wouldn’t even want to buy at the beginning of the year?

The National Retail Federation reports that 89 million people went Black Friday shopping in 2012, spending and average of 423 dollars each and that 97 million were presumed to crowd America’s most popular stores this year. Based on the U.S. Census Bureau, That’s almost a third of the U.S. population.

Black Friday is the biggest publicly advertised shopping day of the year. So people get up past midnight to go on shopping sprees, partly hence the word, black in Black Friday’s name. It is also called Black Friday because black represents a prosperous economical status. Perhaps a bit too prosperous in some cases.

In 2008, a long island Wal-Mart employee was trampled as many overzealous shoppers stormed the doors. Employees actually had to scramble atop the vending machines to avoid the rush of incoming customers. When the madness ceased, 34 year old Jdimytai Damour lay on the floor. Dead. Four shoppers were wounded including a woman who was eight months pregnant. People selfishly kept shopping, not thinking of the man who wouldn’t get to spend the holidays with his family ever again.
Sometimes Black Friday is “overflowing with prosperity” to the point where the demons in people emerge and lose all human quality and compassion. It just goes to show how venomous Black Friday can get. This day of the year is an endeavor to stir the economy and get people to feel like they need to compete and join in all the consumerism.

While most people are crowded in their local stores, fighting over limited Xboxes and televisions (yes, that has happened this year), a wise few are located at home, shopping comfortably. Sara Murray, from Wall Street Journal Live, gives some useful tips on Black Friday shopping if you are still going to try it . She says that the Amazon Price Check app lets you compare a store’s costs to Amazon’s prices and some apps for stores themselves will give you discounts. She also says that it might be worth it to shop later in December as stores cut down prices even more as they near the holidays. Or you could just see what comes up on Cyber Monday after the weekend if you’re not a competitive holiday shopper.

So Black Friday is all really just a ploy to stimulate the economy and manipulate people into thinking that the best deals are only going to come on the most popular shopping day of the year. There are better places and ways that you could be spending your time and money. Don’t walk into a financial trap that the retailers set. Don’t be involved in a tragic incident. Don’t support the madness. Just know that the popular choice is not always the best. Stay away from the holiday of consumerism-a holiday of mayhem.