My parents woke up at four in the morning the day after Thanksgiving.

They came home at noon, haggard and hungry, to eat leftover Thanksgiving dinner for breakfast.

This Black Friday tradition has been in my family for years. When I was little, I used to go with them; that of course changed the year I almost got ran over by a shopping cart at Wal-mart.

Now I sleep in while they run around all the electronics stores in the morning. Then in the afternoon, we would go shopping for clothing.

This year, I’ve noticed a pattern of drawbacks of the day after Thanksgiving. Here are the topic three reasons why post-Thanksgiving shopping can be a pain:

1. The lines. The sheer length of time wasted standing in the lines. It is absolutely absurd when it takes five minutes to pick up a product and two hours to buy it. I remember a couple of years ago when we were at Best Buy getting a new computer, I literally sat on the computer box for over two hours waiting in line. It was probably five in the morning and the whole store had been snaked out in a never- ending S curve. This year, I picked out a shirt from American Eagle and dropped it right after I saw the line starting and ending at the entrance. If stores are going to give enormous sales on the busiest retail shopping day of the year, they should be smart enough to open a couple of extra check-out counters.

2. Accidents. Cars, stores, merchandise, anything that’s accident-prone will occur. On my way to the mall, I spotted three car crashes, two of them in the mall parking lot. Heavy doses of sleep-deprived people under heavy doses of shopping mania spells trouble. Likewise, in the stores, everything was out of order. Cloths were scattered, people were pushing, kids were screaming, and all the workers had a short temper. But it’s hard to blame them since they have to put up with a whole day of this chaos.

3. Rebate forms. A personal favorite of my family, it seems like the week after Thanksgiving is dedicated to filling out and mailing these little gems in order to get the free product. A couple of days ago, dad came in with a handful of rebate forms ready to be filled. It was probably all the stuff they bought that Friday morning. What’s worse, a lot of times the forms get lost in the mail, and a quick buy will turn into a month-long nightmare.