I went Black Friday shopping. On Thursday.

After finishing Thanksgiving dinner, my mother and I braved the frigid cold to visit the Walmart Supercenter in Elkin, North Carolina

Once inside, I wondered if I had walked into the third circle of hell.

Everything about Black Friday sales on Thanksgiving is wrong. The savage consumption, the exploitation of shoppers and the betrayal of a sacred American holiday make events like the one I attended despicable.

In the store, employees in yellow smocks tried to clear pathways in crowded aisles. Confused shoppers clutching ads asked for directions to the line for a $29 Android tablet. Other workers guarded hordes of iPods and “Call of Duty” discs from behind the relative safety of the electronics counter.

People have called the day after Thanksgiving Black Friday since the early 1960s, when shoppers crowded the streets of downtown Philadelphia, creating a major traffic snarl.

“Black Friday is the name which the Philadelphia Police Department has given to the Friday following Thanksgiving Day,” said Earl Apfelbaum, in his shopping ad from 1966, trying to promote his store’s year-round deals. “It’s not a term of endearment to them.”

Little has changed. On Thanksgiving, armed police officers patrolled the aisles while the Walmart’s parking lot filled with shoppers’ cars.

As 6:00 p.m. drew near, crowds coalesced around the piles of Nerf guns and Disney dolls. Some already had their hands on items, making sure they could get the one, or five, that they wanted. Others hung back with their empty shopping carts, biding their time.

This year, Walmart spread out their deals over three events, with the first one at six PM on Thursday. It is all part of their master plan to maximize revenue during this critical shopping period. By extending the sales, executives hope they can get deal hunters to come back over and over again.

“It used to be called Black Friday, then it became Thursday (and) now it’s a week long,” said Duncan MacNaughton, Walmart U.S. Chief Merchant in Fortune. “Maybe we should just call it November.”

A voice crackled over the intercom, opening with a plea for shoppers to listen to the store associates and police officers. This came as a surprise to no one in the store. Last year, a video of a fight at this store went viral and wound up on the national news.

Then the magic words came: “You may now make your selections for the six o’clock sale.”

The store exploded into a flurry of activity. People grabbed the items they had guarded so carefully and threw them into their carts.

With air guns and art supplies, shoppers pushed their way towards checkout lines that extended well into the apparel department. Aisles looked like a Los Angeles freeway on a Friday afternoon.

I found myself walled in by shopping carts in the women’s underwear section. People pushing carts had squeezed themselves so close together that no one could get through.

Who would want to go through that?

The consulting firm Accenture found in its annual Holiday Shopping Survey that 66 percent of respondents would likely shop on Black Friday this year. That is up from 44 percent in 2011, despite overwhelmingly negative media coverage of the day.

Are the deals so good that Americans will ignore the pleas of the cool-headed?

“The savings offered by doorbuster deals — the ones people literally line up for weeks for — couldn’t possibly make up for the time and discomfort involved,” writes Shane Roberts for the blog Kinja Deals, which has posted multiple guides to saving on Black Friday this year. “And in any case, those people could be getting the same deals online.”

After going through this, I am inclined to agree with Roberts. I am not ready to give up my Thanksgiving holiday for a $648 flat screen television or a $10 pair of jeans.

So what did I buy at Walmart if it was the third circle of hell?

I could only bring myself to get the essentials: laundry detergent, window cleaner and sour cream.

Such steals.