Disappointed? Get used to it.

We don’t know what you were expecting. Everything about us, from our jaded writing to our very name, should give you a strong hint as to how we feel about manufactured shopping occasions. Let’s just get it straight right now: we’re always going to disappoint you on Black Friday. And Cyber Monday. And every other phony retail holiday the industry might dream up.

We even made a game out of it. Download, print, and play our new board game Bleak Friday: The Game of Discount Discontentment to experience all the frustration and hollowness of the shopping scramble without leaving home or logging on. Talk about it with your fellow unenthusiasts in the Official Bleak Friday Tips & Tricks & Whines & Gripes Forum. It’s absolutely no fun whatsoever!

Even if we did believe in Black Friday, we can’t put deals like this together every day, all year long, and then kick it up a notch today. Full-price megalomerates can spend months lining up a great (well, “great” by their standards) deal, and then sit on it until Black Friday, when they roll a few of them out at loss-leader prices to entice the suckers in the door. Oops, it’s sold out, but here, enjoy paying full price for some other crap so you don’t go home empty-handed.

You know what we did with the great deals we scored a month ago? Sold them three weeks ago. All of them we had were available at the same low price. Without peddling any other high-margin sticker-price stuff. If that’s the Black Friday fun you’re looking for, there’s no shortage of vampires out there who’ll be only too happy to oblige.

But us, this is all we got. The only headphones in the world where you can drop the price by $60-$80 and they’re still overpriced. Unlike most Beats deals on Black Friday, these are the current model, the Solo2, not the old Solo or Solo HD models. We’re told they get the bass balance better than the notoriously bottom-heavy original Beats headphones. But you can get better headphones for the same price or less. We still wouldn’t pay this much for Beats even if Dre himself threw in a quarter of chronic from his personal stash. Let some other chump pay for those relentless Beats ad campaigns. They’re just headphones.Not good enough? We’d say we hate to disappoint you on such a special day… but the truth is we actually sort of enjoy it.