Each year, on the day after Thanksgiving, we celebrate Black Friday. It’s supposed to be the day when businesses finally move from the red ink to the black ink in their yearly ledgers. Just about everything is on sale on Black Friday, and people used to get to the stores the night before and sleep out there on the sidewalks so they could bust the doors at dawn.

Amazon and other mercantile behemoths looked at this curious aspect of human nature and decided to get a jump on the madness by starting Black Friday much earlier than the day after Thanksgiving. They gave us the option of ordering from a place where we would not be trampled to death — our couches.