Those Black Friday deals can be hard to beat, and in the hands of an already-established shopaholic, the post-holiday tradition can become truly insane.
The majority of stores across the United States engage in massive sales the day after Thanksgiving, luring shoppers into spending a little extra through massive price cuts and tantalizing deals. Even the most reserved of shoppers can take things a bit far when those Black Friday sales hit, but few display a dedication to the craft like TikToker Brady Medearis (@bradymedearis)’s mom.
Like something straight out of a JCPenney commercial, a TikTok uploaded to the creator’s page showcases the bad case of oniomania. The content creator’s mother displays truly Hallmark levels of unbothered where her Christmas shopping is concerned, apparently more than willing to spend her family out of house and home for a few extra gifts under the tree.
This woman is an Olympic-level shopper, something established right from the get-go when Medearis’ father notes that his wife was up “at four o’clock in the morning” to get her shopping trip started. She then endured insane lines, clogged parking lots, and overcrowded stores to bring home a truly ungodly amount of presents, all of which she slowly retrieves to her husband’s growing dismay.
The silly Grinch pillows were all well and good, but once his wife reaches the tenth — then fifteenth, then twentieth — bag of goodies, pops starts to grow concerned. His repeated queries of “there’s more?” and “how much more is there?” become gradually more incredulous as his wife fully fills up the spacious living room with an undeniably insane amount of purchased goods.
By the time she’s finished — and even then she left a few things behind because they’re “too heavy,” — the living room has been replaced by a shopaholic’s dreamscape. The carpet is gone, overwhelmed by the truly baffling number of bags, mostly from JCPenney, littering the floor. As each fresh load comes in, Medearis’s father grows more defeated, clearly calculating the cost of his wife’s addiction in his head.
Black Friday shoppers set a new record this year, spending an eye-watering $10.8 billion in online sales alone. That’s an increase of more than 10% from last year, an uptick that could indicate improving moods surrounding the economy. What’s more, experts expect that Black Friday won’t even be the biggest shopping day of the year — that title instead falls to Cyber Monday, a day on which people commonly polish off their online shopping for the season.
With nearly $11 billion already spent, it’s hard to wrap one’s brain around how much spending could take place today, but with Medearis’s mother all finished, I imagine the number will shrink. After all, that load alone looks like it accounts for a good fourth of the spending tracked by major retailers. She may be single-handedly keeping JCPenney afloat, at this point, and her poor hubby now faces the monumental task of sorting, wrapping, and addressing all of those gifts — not to mention paying down the debt acquired over a single 10-hour shopping trip.