Cyber Monday: I can't wait until Psycho Saturday and Worst Behaviour Ever Wednesday, but I reserve my right to sneer

If you missed the memo about Cyber Monday bargains I expect you feel extremely silly. Actually, worse than that. Bloody furious. It sneaked up just like last week’s Black Friday shopping armageddon. One moment Cyber Monday wasn’t “a thing”, but then it most definitely was a thing. A huge, exciting money-saving thing! TomTom satnavs at Halfords.com for £99! £100 off Canon PowerShots at Argos! And you missed it. You whopping great “pay the registered retail price” lummox!

Clearly the hypothesis that recreational shopping has replaced God as the chief obsession of the masses is not radical or fresh. Yet when I wander around a heaving Westfield of a Sunday (which I do regularly, I love shopping) it’s hard to miss the extreme sense of joy and purpose present in its congregation.

Westfield – note, other good shopping malls do exist – is simply jam-packed with shiny, sparkly, time-saving, beautifying, life-enhancing, better-than-the-one-before purchase opportunities. I feel excited just describing it. Escorting these said products to the requisite tills, placing them in branded plastic carrier bags, and then taking them home, is, to my mind, one of the greatest human contentments known.

If this makes you sad, then please avoid clips of Black Friday bargain hunters throwing old ladies into piles of tinned marrowfat peas in order to secure £20 off a Kindle Fire. Instead, embrace the glorious retail future. By the year 2050 I estimate all of Britain’s most exciting high days and holidays will be shopping events: Black Friday! Psycho Saturday! Worst Behaviour Ever Wednesday! And so on.

If you don’t believe me, try explaining to a modern-day teenager the significance of Whit Monday, that ever-floating national day off around May, after Pentecost, in celebration of the Christian baptismal seasons. Then try explaining to the same teenager Cyber Monday: “It’s a day at the start of December where everyone goes crazy and buys cheap iPads as gifts for the 25th.” Whit, jog on, mate, thy days are numbered.

Of course, with the unveiling of these new phenomena, Black Friday and Cyber Monday, we quickly ran into a whole new set of etiquette rules. Until now, I have always believed that when, say, Boxing Day Sale shopping, the normal rules of public life apply. When considering whether to purchase a Dualit toaster discounted by £18, then punching, kicking, clothes-lining – or any manoeuvres typically seen in an Eighties school-yard game of British bulldog – would be strictly verboten. Retail therapy should be gentle fun. We are shoppers, not savages.

Yet by 10am on Black Friday, the middle classes had already got themselves into a pickle over whether it was politically correct or, worse, “problematic” to laugh or gasp at hysterical marauding over Clairol foot spas. Accusations of “sneering” at those less fortunate surfaced, and as we know, “sneering” became a very serious matter not so long ago. There seemed to be a school of thought that, going forwards, when faced with pictures of women hitting each other over a discount television in Wembley Asda, one shouldn’t deplore violence but instead sympathise with the poor and their need for HDTV.

The honking great problem, for me, was that here were the middle classes imagining the working classes to be one great lumpen mass who believe Black Friday brawling over cut-price toastie-makers is just fine. I’m going to go out on a limb here as a woman from working-class stock and say they do not. Tons of people on lesser wages think the Black Friday troublemakers are complete tits, too.

It isn’t “snobbery” to expect sale shopping in Dundee, Glasgow, Cardiff and London to go on without police control. It isn’t sneering to be disgusted by the threats to shop staff. It isn’t snobbery to feel sad at a tweet from Sergeant Paul Marshall, a Metropolitan Police officer that says: “Even on #BlackFriday shoving people to the floor so you can get £20 off a Coffee Maker is still an assault.” It is snobbery, however, to think the everyday working-class clientele of Wembley Asda condone this cheerfully.

I suppose the one good thing about Cyber Monday is that even the worst examples of sales shoppers, and in fact the human race, are confined behind laptops for at least 24 hours in their search for a discount Sony camcorder. God knows how they have any friends to film. Perhaps they find these online, too.