THIS IS NOT AN ADVERTISEMENT! REALLY! IT'S NOT! Okay, got that out of the way. To quote John Lennon "Yeahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh". Oh, wrong quote. Um, to quote John Lennon, "So this is Christmas."  I don't really shop there...much. I will tell you a story about Big Lots from days of old. There used to be a time and place where in my area, stores would be closed on Thanksgiving day and Christmas day and New Years day. Convenience stores, the drug store, some gas stations, and maybe the doughnut shop were open.

Going way back to when I was working for McDonalds and driving around in my "little brown nugget", you didn't get much to do on Thanksgiving. It's the way it should be. Now if you had a mom that worked on Thanksgiving or your friends would do dinner later in the day, you had time to kill. You'd see the parade, maybe watch a few movies, see "It's A Wonderful Life" or watch FOOBAH. I looked forward to Mickey Macs on Thanksgiving. It was one of two days when you got the day off and weren't called to come in and work.

Predicting the shopping madness on Thanksgiving to come, a (then) smaller company that sold overstocked and close out crap called BIG LOTS (or in Ric's parlance sounding like Animal from the Muppets "BIIIIIGGGGGGLOSS") started the then "novelty" of being open on Turkey day.  I had gone to this store at quite a distance to North Ridgeville, Ohio because it was the ONLY store that I knew of. My retail senses were tingling even before I got into retail. It was in an old Kroger supermarket, or Meier Goldberg or Fazios or maybe Stop and Shop, not sure what it was, but it seemed like a shopping center typical Kroger of the 70's. Big Lots was great back when because they went into long shuttered retail spaces and brought the space back to life with minimal repair to the space. They threw in some shelves and covered up walls with shelves in a half assed way, so you could see where the meat department was. (One store that I went too many years later was inside a Fazios and the 70's dark brown shingled faux roof over the deli was still in place.)

So, here was this purveyor of crap, more crap, and cheap crap. It was a treasure hunt of crap whenever I went. I found a MIDI control Yamaha mini keyboard guitar. I bought a ton of the flavored Pepsi (tropical, raspberry...) dirt cheap. (I proceeded to maybe drink a total of 18 until I was sick of it and had 60 or so cans to go.) Big Lots was doing what only one off companies were doing. Selling stuff that manufacturers realized "OOPS" or "re-manufactured" junk. Hardly anybody else was doing that other than bargain clothing chains.

So, this company decided to OPEN on THANKSGIVING. Hey! Now I got some place to go when there is nothing else going on. Let's go! I went. It wasn't even that busy because SANE people were home with their families rather than looking for a REMAN'ed coffee maker to save a buck or two. For the next couple of years, this became my tradition. Plus, my friends and I had a "gag gift" thing when we exchanged gifts. So, I would use this shopping opportunity to actually buy a gag gift. The one I remember most was the "industrial" pack (black and white wrapping for food service) of Cinnamon Pop Tarts. I'm sure that some were not all in their original form based on the sandy sound and baggy feel of either side of the bag. So, I bought a cheap plastic punch bowl and a dollar linoleum knife and proceeded to smash the whole bag to dust and give that for Christmas with a "Dig In" note.  Man I loved the Lots. I didn't realize, years later, shopping on Thanksgiving was the norm. "Don't you people have homes?" (Thanks Ted Knight from Caddyshack.)

They closed the North Ridgeville store several years ago. It was a smaller store and Big Lots was going upscale.  It would make sense as Big Lots was in the internet age and leasing more "A" and "B" retail spots and making them all nice and clean as opposed to the rummage sale feel. I never worked for them, but here's my sense of humor for junk. I found this hat for 49 cents at a thrift store and thought it would be funny as something at the front of my Christmas tree. HAHAHAHAHAHA. Isn't that HY-STERICAL? Nahh, I lied. This was an advertisement for Big Lots. The greatest place to buy you $30 4" Polaroid Android tablet rather than the $30 MP3 player from a participating FYE. You can go on the web with it. Yeah.

Um, another lie. It's funny to ME. My junk blog. Christmas junk. "BIIIIIGGGGGGLOSS" -Ric