By Ronn Chesmonde

Thanks to my wife (who left me three weeks ago, taking our two kids and leaving me with a hefty mortgage payment and an order of protection), I can finally participate in the shopping tradition known as Black Friday. Here are just a few strategies to remember when you venture out on the day after Thanksgiving to take advantage of the area’s Holiday shopping deals:

1.  Keep your elbows up.
Many shoppers forget how effective the human elbow is for warding off other prospective buyers.  A stiff shot to the bridge of the nose will effectively stop a charging shopper in their tracks, leaving her lying unconscious in a pool of her own blood and leaving you with one of those hard-to-get fake hamsters that seem to be the rage this year.

2. Protective equipment makes you look stupid but it works.
I’m not embarrassed to say that I’ll be wearing a hockey helmet, knee pads and a sturdy cup when I line up at 3:00 am for Walmart’s Black Friday deals.  The right equipment helps to minimize the need for using strategy #1.

3. Use personal stench to your strategic advantage.
Let’s be honest: most real men like me only stop drinking on Thanksgiving because our wives don’t want us driving the family home in an inebriated haze.  But since my wife “solved” that “problem” for me when she “abandoned” me last month, I can start boozing at 7am Thanksgiving Day and keep going straight through ’till late Sunday night.  Which means I am going to reek in the Wal-Mart Black Friday line after I start dropping my patented “Silent But Deadlies,” which are always brought on by the copious amounts of Gordon’s Gin that I consume during the holidays.  I plan to use the resulting 12-foot-diameter circle of noxious personal space to get a head-start on my competition after both the doors and my colon burst wide open.

4. Falsely accuse a minority of taking your stuff.
I perfected this strategy with my older brother during Halloween when we realized that we could just take candy from the unfortunate kids who had been determined by American society to have less rights than us.  This saved us hours of wasted doorbell-ringing and we ended up with a lot more candy.  Pick the minority carefully, though. I recommend non-English speakers as police officers will always give someone the benefit of the doubt when he knows the language of the good-old USA.  Just find a cart full of desirable product being pushed by someone who looks like they were born abroad and call for security immediately.  It never hurts to have an accomplice who “witnessed” your cart being taken by the darker-skinned suspect.  And take it from my personal experience: if you use an African American female as the mark with this strategy you may get a shopping cart full of deals but you will probably not escape the parking lot with your life.

5. Skip Black Friday sales altogether and head straight to the nearest bar.
The more I write about Black Friday strategies, the more I realize that I prefer drinking over shopping.  See you at Kronie’s!