I remember when the local Shopping Center had something called "Moonlight Madness." The ads showed a yawning crescent moon wearing a nightcap, holding a candle. Wear your pajamas, kids! Fun for all! The stores, you see, were staying open until 10 p.m., which broke all the known laws of retail.
Ten p.m. was as far as this lunacy extended. If you'd shown up downtown at a department store at 2:30 a.m. and told the night watchman, "Look, I'm wide awake, I need an electric eggbeater," he'd have called the cops and you would be put away for observation.
Not anymore. First the stores open on Thanksgiving, and since there were no spontaneous riots of protest, a few stores have announced they'll be continuously open Friday through Christmas Eve. They will close that day at 6 p.m. so employees can go home and be with their families, or, as it's known, "fall asleep face-first in the mashed potatoes."
This is only the start. Next year stores will open on Christmas evening so people can enjoy pre-post-Christmas sales, and soon a new tradition will be born: opening your gifts in the car in the parking lot a few minutes before the store opens, so you can get right in and exchange that sweater that looks like someone stuffed a monkey full of pizza and fed it to a wood chipper.
In 10 years, the stores will never close, but there will be a ceremony at 6 p.m., as the manager puts the key into the lock, turns it, then unlocks the door again, signifying the specialness of that blessed time between 6:00:00 p.m. Dec. 24 and 6:00:30. Since it's a time for family and togetherness, employees will use the 30 seconds to text greetings to loved ones, along with a coupon code redeemable for 20 percent off unsold ornaments.
In 20 years we'll just hold Christmas in the Mall, and exchange identical beige plastic rectangles redeemable for merchandise anywhere. A featureless card that symbolizes a predefined monetary value? You shouldn't have. The clerks will have to work, of course, but they will wear patches that release tryptophan to simulate the consumption of turkey. The store manager will pass out capsules filled with gravy, which the clerks can either bite down on, or let dissolve in their mouths while they ring things up.
It can't stop there; progress marches on. Retail scientists are working on opening a portal to an alternate universe where time moves much more slowly, permitting people to shop for extended periods of time before they return to normal space, whereupon they collapse in a pile of dust because they've actually been gone for 600 years, the packages falling to the pavement and breaking.
They'll have to fix that last part. No store will take anything back after 600 years. Even Nordstrom draws the line at half a millennium, except for fruitcake.
