Now that the holiday selling season has kicked into high gear with the lunacy of Black Friday, it reminds me of the madness, insanity and poor decision making I’ve witnessed in my own years in retail.

If anything, the holiday shopping season is defined by the fact that people want what they’re buying now: not now, but RIGHT NOW. Forget about backorders, forget about transfers from another location, if you have it, they’ll buy it, and if you don’t, they won’t.

That sense of urgency was especially apparent in oil field workers, clearly back in town after weeks on the rigs, often with only a few days left until Christmas. Big screen TV, amp, speakers, wire, the whole nine yards. Some of the biggest and easiest sales of my life were like that.

However, the most impulsive and demented purchase I can recall was the one evening where I sold a 36-inch Sony XBR tube TV to a gentleman who absolutely, positively had to have it that night. In fact, he was so adamant that I would have suspected him of credit card fraud if he hadn’t paid cash for it. So I wheeled the box out into the parking lot to his hatchback compact car.

Needless to say, it wouldn’t fit in the hatch.

Not a problem! He and his buddy whipped out a roll of duct tape, stuffed the big heavy box into the hatch at an oblique angle and duct taped to the car.

I didn’t see how it ended; I excused myself and went back inside, wanting to absolve myself and our store from any responsibility from the looming disaster. But I like to think that he made it home okay.