Here comes the biggest Vindicator of the year

Black Friday has grown into a Third Millennium phenomenon, and it creates huge business at The Vindicator in the same way that it does on U.S. 224 and other retail hubs.

We might not have people lined up outside our doors like Target. But the Thanksgiving Day newspaper that feeds into Black Friday has become an event in and of itself for us and other newspapers.

It’s such a demand that newspapers around the country have had special events and charged special prices in recognition of the unique place Thanksgiving Day newspapers have between buyers and sellers. And some newspapers actually do have people lined up outside for that edition.

We are embracing the Black Friday shopping blitz in two ways:

First is our largest newspaper of the year Thursday with 53 shopping inserts that will be available around midnight Wednesday. Our cousins over at WFMJ will visit this week for a fun behind-the-scenes look by Mike Case at the biggest newspaper of the year.

Second is a special vindy.com Web page by our in-house shopping whiz, Mark Sweetwood. He’s the type that, if you find your “greatest deal of the year” and tell him, he will have found it two days earlier, and got it 10 percent cheaper because he applied “this” rebate and “that” discount that folks only like him know about. On Friday, he’ll be amid the crush at 3 a.m.

All of it centers around Black Friday, which, for the most part, has been consuming our lives only for the past 10 years.

Now, Black Friday has been part of our lives much longer than that, according to some quick online research. But it’s become a craze in the 2000s — when box stores started selling big ’n’ sexy TVs for the price of disposable razors. That got us to leave our Thanksgiving parties and formed the first “Occupy” movements, which were outside chain stores.

Philadelphia gets most of the credit for attaching the term Black Friday to the “Friday-after-Thanksgiving” shopping. Clogged streets and intersections drove police crazy. A name was created, and the trend grew.

Now we camp out and sometimes trample one another for a good deal.

For the record, 22 years as an adult for me — and not one Black Friday morning.

The streak will continue this week.

The only black I will encounter Friday morning will be my coffee and the crispy parts on my hash browns if they’re cooked just right.

Our largest paper of the year actually started getting produced last week. Imagine making four small sandwiches and then stacking them atop each other. That’s how the biggest paper of the year gets produced.

Two more “sandwiches” will be made Tuesday and Wednesday morning, before the final sandwich is made near midnight Wednesday so that you have a huge newspaper Thursday morning.

All tolled, nearly 2.7 million shopping inserts will be processed in our place just for the Thanksgiving newspaper.

Watch the “WFMJ Today” morning news show Wednesday to see the behind-the-scenes look from Case.

Sweetwood started his work last week, as well — sifting through all the inserts to find the best prices on the most-popular items.

He’ll post what he’s gleaned on a special Web page starting Friday that you can access on your phones while in line.

So enjoy your holiday, enjoy our biggest newspaper of the year, enjoy the reports from WFMJ and managing editor Mark Sweetwood.

And I’ll be enjoying my crispy hash browns.

Todd Franko is editor of The Vindicator. He likes emails about stories and our newspaper. Email him at tfranko@vindy.com. He blogs, too, on vindy.com.