Giving Black Thursday the boot

The plan was to go to Belk's Thursday evening.

Kim was casually interested in a pair of cowgirl boots and Belk's was advertising its Black Thursday sale where you could buy a pair of boots for $19.95. The sale began at 8 p.m. and lasted until 1 p.m. the next day.

So we left at 7:45 p.m., thinking, hey, this is the Belk's in Lexington. It won't be that busy. Anyway, everybody will be at Walmart, right? Plus, we'd never done Black Thursday (or Black Friday) shopping before. We tend to shop out of catalogues, so the experience of shopping in a crowd might be enlightening. Maybe.

I can't believe how naive we are, even at our advanced ages.

When I turned down the entrance road to the mall, the parking lot in front of Belk's was jam-packed. It looked like a Jerry Hunt used car lot. The place was top heavy with cars. Cars as far as you could see. Never in my life in Lexington had I seen the Belk's parking lot that filled before. I thought a football game had broken out.

Uh-oh. This isn't good.

I thought, well, maybe we can still go, but as we kept driving closer to Belk's, we saw a gigantic line of people waiting to get in the store. It still wasn't quite 8 p.m. yet, and the line waiting to get in snaked its way from the front entrance doors and around the building until people were standing in the service road. Hundreds of people, patiently waiting to get into Belk's.

It was incredible. Why do people put themselves through this? I turned to Kim.

"Let's get out of here," she said, and so we did.

We actually tried again the next day, getting to Belk's around 10 a.m. or so, but, of course, everything had been picked over by then even though the place was less frantic. Kim couldn't find her size in the style she was interested in, having tried on a pair a half-size too large and another pair a half-size too small. But neither felt comfortable to her. Plus, they weren't even leather to begin with.

"Let's get out of here," she said, and so we did.

So Kim is bootless still. Hmm. Her birthday is coming up in February. Maybe, just maybe...