Once again the duties of a journalist have taken me to a place I have never been. Don’t get too excited, though. These journalistic jaunts don’t take me to far and away exotic places. Most are local travel destinations that I just have never seen before, like the inside of the bars on Broadway Street when I wrote a piece on beer licenses in Tooele City or my first rodeo at Deseret Peak with the Little Buckaroos.

Last week’s adventure was to visit what is billed the best and perhaps most intense shopping day of the year — Black Friday.

I have never, at least in my recollection, been shopping on Black Friday. Even though I spent two years working in retail during the Christmas season, I didn’t even know what Black Friday was until I heard the term last year.

According to the folks at time.com, the term “Black Friday” — as far as the day of shopping that follows Thanksgiving — goes back as far as 1960 in Philadelphia. Back then the city had a day of retail shopping sandwiched between Thanksgiving and the Saturday after Thanksgiving, which was the day of the traditional Army-Navy football game hosted by the town.

Retailers loved the day, but other Philadelphians like the police department, cab drivers and others who had to venture out onto the streets on that dreaded day, borrowed a term from an 1864 stock market panic and began to refer to the day as Black Friday.

Sometime later in the early-1980s, retailers didn’t like a negative connotation hanging over their favorite day and spun a new tale telling how the shopping on Black Friday was the day their books went from the red to the black — an accounting term for turning a profit.

The financial story stuck and by 1990 the term Black Friday became popularly accepted as the term for the nationwide shopping melee that follows Thanksgiving.

Enough of the history lesson. This year I was assigned to write about Black Friday and Tooele merchants.

I arose early on Friday at 4:30 a.m., got dressed and headed out the door for Wal-Mart, which I understood was kicking off its Black Friday specials at 5 a.m.

I entered Main Street from Vine Street where all was dark, with a few exceptions. A light was on at Nigh-Time Donuts, 7-Eleven was open, there were a few cars in front of Denny’s, and Macey’s Food and Drug was lit up, but the parking lot empty.

Then I turned into the Wal-Mart parking lot and it was full. And I mean full, yes, fuller than Christmas Eve, which is my usual shopping time. Every single slot was full, people were parking on the street and anywhere they could put their car. I parked by Applebee’s and walked over to Wal-Mart.

It was 5 a.m. and the store was packed. I was surprised, however, by the orderliness of the crowd. I made my way to the back of the store to the electronics department, over toys, and then all the way across the store to the food department.

People were saying “excuse me” and “I am sorry” as they accidentally bumped into each other or inadvertently cut somebody off. I heard people asking, “Hey pass me one of those,” while pointing to a display across the aisle, which was crammed full of bodies trying to move in different directions at the same time, and sooner or later one would emerge from the sky and fall in the person’s basket.

Meanwhile, over in the empty food department families would regroup and take inventory of their shopping cart before making another foray into the crowd. Baskets full of TVs, towels and toys swarmed the aisles and soon backed up at all 26 registers, plus the pharmacy and any other place with a cash register.

I safely exited the store without incident and headed over to Home Depot, which had just opened its doors around 6 a.m.

The parking lot was more than three-fourths full — more than I have ever seen there on a typical do-it yourself Saturday. After seeing Wal-Mart’s parking lot I wasn’t sure there was a car left in Tooele.

Inside Home Depot was not as crowded as Wal-Mart, but still very busy with carts of artificial trees and shop vacs filling the aisles.

From Home Depot I went across the street to see how the locals were faring at Liddiard’s Home Furnishings. There I found a line of 13 people waiting for the store to open at 8 a.m. The first person in line said she has been there since 3:30 a.m. She was determined to get one of their Black Friday laptop computers for a once-in-a-lifetime price.

From there I stopped off at Game Stop. The small store was full of people looking for video games for Christmas presents. Then I went up to Sears and Big 5. Both stores were already open and weren’t crowded with people, but for 6:30 a.m. on a Friday just having a dozen people in your store is probably a success.

I then went to Macey’s to get some doughnuts for breakfast. The store, at least at this hour of the morning, was empty. I think Macey’s and the food section at Wal-Mart are proof that Black Friday shoppers are not worried about food, at least not until later in the day.

While I did not buy anything, my first Black Friday was now over as I returned home.

Once more I can say that journalism has taken me exploring new worlds and places where I have never gone before.

Tim Gillie: tgillie@tooeletranscript.com