Hitting the sales in New York City

NEW YORK (CNN) -- "Mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun." Once a witty observation by Noel Coward leveled at the British obsession with ignoring local customs and throwing themselves, with vigor, into an uncomfortable situation, has become something of a national motto.

One of these scenarios in the modern world is the streets and department stores of New York city, the weekend following Thanksgiving, with one of the most favorable exchange rates between the dollar and the pound in recent history.

The sales that begin on the Friday are the first major step towards the Christmas shopping rush, although there have been festive inklings for more than a month. The staff in the "Holiday" section of Bloomingdale's admit, with a slight hint of mania, the Christmas music has been on loop there since mid-October.

Every storefront in the city takes on a holiday sheen, with the big names fiercely competing for the most original display; Barney's pulled off the most unique, with a green motif made out of recycled trash, but my personal favorite was the liquor store that suggested: "Give the gift of beer."

It seems to be common knowledge that the big bargains are to be found in the major department stores, where racks of sale items crop up round every corner. As a result, the city's two largest department stores, Macy's and Bloomingdale's, quickly filled up with people eager to make a start on their gift buying.

Macy's, the more moderately priced of the pair, is much busier than its luxury counterpart. The sales staff seemed constantly rushed, though always effortlessly polite and helpful, and there was a line of epic proportions simply to get to the escalator.

Yet, the escalators in Macy's were a constant source of amazement, mainly because they were so well organized.

In London people are used to escalators, they serve purely as a means of getting from a high place to a low one, or vice-versa, with less effort than a staircase -- they are in no way remarkable. In Macy's they are an event.

The old wooden escalators dotted about the building are fascinating, but there's no time to stop and look (and people who do are shoved or tutted at), as a uniformed shopper-shepherd keeps everything moving.

Escalator accidents aren't common in London, but the panic instilled in a visiting Brit by having someone regularly tell you to "be careful," or "pay attention" undoes any confidence a seasoned escalator-rider may have built up.

Bloomingdale's is a much more refined sort of busy. The escalators are as unremarkable as those in the UK, and in the place of Macy's shopper shepherds, there are overly-friendly greeters reminding you to have a nice time in the store.

In both buildings, however, the friendly employees are almost entirely eclipsed by the surly, sour-faced customers. It seems Christmas cheer arrives early only if you have something to sell.

As well as a healthy sense of competition in every shopper, the other startlingly regular factor is the British accent.

On previous trips abroad, finding someone from your home nation has a mix of joy at meeting a kindred spirit and annoyance that your novelty has been cheapened somewhat.

When you arrive in a store filled with people, in country where you speak the language fluently and have been humming "Englishman in New York" over and over to yourself, you want to feel special, that you should be applauded for making the extra effort.

However, if you are surrounded by what seems like an army of your fellow countrymen, and they are all doing exactly the same thing as you, having made the same effort as you, being impressed by the same magnificent festivity of the city as you, it ruins the fun a little.

It would appear that since the UK is enjoying a period of relative prosperity and the pound is rocketing while the dollar nose-dives, anyone who can spare the time has hopped on a plane and gone to Macy's just in time for the sales.

Whether the motive is to feel like we are getting more than our friends back home, or to get the most bang for our buck, or simply to get an extreme version of every experience we have, the British take to NYC's sales like they do to baking in the Mediterranean sun.

Whether there were any New Yorkers in the stores at all, save for the ever-helpful staff, I can't tell, but if I were them I would have made the most of the other options New York has to offer, and paid a visit to the relatively deserted boutiques of the Lower East Side.

And, in the end, that was exactly what I did -- after making sure I had rummaged through and milked the sales racks for all they were worth. E-mail to a friend