Places: JCPenney at Penn Square Mall on Black Friday

The tires squeal as I whip my car off Northwest Expressway into the Penn Square Mall parking lot. Immediately, a filthy old Ford F-150 drifts into my lane without warning. One long honk of my Civic’s pipsqueak horn jolts the driver, and the clunker darts back into its lane. I stomp on the accelerator and haul toward the mall.

It’s 3:52 a.m. on Black Friday. I’ve been awake for 22 minutes.

I have to get to JCPenney by 4 a.m., when doors open. My assignment is simple: Wait in line with the Black Friday diehards, burst through the doors with them and observe as they ravage the racks in search of sales. My hope is to find out if there’s more than just saving money to this catalyst of capitalism, this rose of retail, this robber of rest.

Best I can tell, there isn’t.

“It’s all about the deals,” shopper Mary Greer, 39, of Oklahoma City, later tells me, echoing others’ sentiments.

The plan is to arrive just before doors open and huddle in line outside with a pack of early bird shoppers, our breath puffing through the winter air like plumes of exhaust from race cars waiting for the green flag.

It’s 3:54 a.m., not much time left. All around the parking lot, drivers accelerate — then brake! Accelerate, brake! Accelerate, brake, park — now run! The sounds of cold car engines buzz by as I scurry up to the entrance.

And — no one’s here.

They’re inside, hundreds of them. One woman is already barreling out of the store carrying two bags bursting with clothes. I check my watch — 3:55 a.m.

The hunt started early.

I find our photographer, David McDaniel, inside. Unlike me, this isn’t his first Black Friday rodeo: He got here about 3:30 a.m., knowing Black Friday stores sometimes open early.

“They’ve done that to me before,” McDaniel says while showing me pictures of the first two shoppers in line, who said they got there at 2 a.m.

There is nothing out of the ordinary about JCPenney. If you’ve been to one department store, you’ve been to all. But on this morning, once a year, it is transformed. It is a jungle overrun, a rumpus of every species of shopper imaginable.

Some shop alone, know exactly what they want and dash in and out — done, done and on to the next one. Others shop in packs, and, like predators, quickly size up the deals to see if they’re good catches or scraps for the scavengers. Plenty of other glazed-eye zombies are just along for the ride, blindly following their leaders through every aisle, up every escalator and into every fitting room.

There are no carts at the store, so you’re limited to what you can carry. Many shoppers grapple with gravity with each additional item they tuck under, hang from or drape over their arms.

Über-cheerful employees scan items through checkout registers at breakneck speed to a cascade of beeps and blips that sounds like R2-D2. “Let it Snow” plays. The crackling, sharp noise from the turning of glossy pages in the store’s 64-page advertisement sweeps through the store, which is in pristine shape, smelling of shampooed carpet and shining like the sun that won’t rise for hours.

A lot of shoppers are coughing, their bodies not accustomed to being up at this hour (and probably still processing pounds of food from the day before). Some are dressed to the nines, cleaned up for a day of deals. Others just rolled out of bed. The public address speaker crackles overhead. A soft-spoken man says: “Do you know what time it is? It’s 4:03, and it’s also time to visit the fine jewelry department, where prices are extra low!”

The hunt goes on.

— Staff Writer John Estus

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