Those of you who remember this side note from an old post:

Also, why are Halloween lights a thing? And Valentine’s Day lights? If that trend continues, we’ll see Independence Day lights, the Christmas decoration season will effectively be twelve months long, and consumerism will reign for a thousand years.

…and this one about people who still had their Christmas lights turned on in February…

The trouble is that people aren’t still celebrating Christmas. The holiday dinners and holiday travel are done with, and the presents are all open. All you’re doing is extending the artificial and increasingly strained pose of good cheer…

The three of you who read both of those will probably be able to guess how I feel about “Christmas in July” sales.

But those weren’t bad enough. “Christmas in July” is old hat, and the cyberpunk dystopia we’re living in needs to keep serving up fresh badness, or else we might grow numb to the horror and find some small fleck of contentment in our lives. And that’s why a computer manufacturer is now advertising something called “Black Friday in July.”

No, I don’t care that this despicable phenomenon is several years old. It’s still disgusting, because consumerism shouldn’t be treated as a religion rather than the excuse for exploitation that it is, and even pretending to treat a traditionally scheduled sale like an actual holiday is… ugh.

(Today’s suggested search terms are “Black Friday stampede” and “Black Friday riot.”)

P.S. The only tolerable thing about Black Friday that it’s only a day long, and the really obnoxious part of it occurs in a few hours before dawn. Dell’s “Black Friday in July,” by contrast, lasts 15 days, only two of which are Fridays. “Black Friday in July” doesn’t even start or end on a Friday, for sanity’s sake.