And after spending plenty of time in the center of the action, I can tell you this: There are a lot of misconceptions about what these events are actually like and about what their significance is in the retail industry. Here are a few things that people often say about Black Friday — and an explanation of why they aren’t quite right.

1. “No one even shops on Black Friday anymore.” I get why people think this, because it’s true that it just doesn’t seem as urgent to shop on the day after Thanksgiving as it used to. Retailers are trying to offer a steady stream of discounts throughout November and December to keep you coming to the mall and filling up your digital shopping cart. And then there’s the batch of deals that retailers actually bill as their “Black Friday” offering. Those typically get started several days before Friday and often run all weekend long. This Jeep commercial captures the new reality quite well:

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But, it’s wildly off base to say that Black Friday is no longer a booming day for spending. The National Retail Federation surveyed consumers heading into the holiday season about their shopping plans and found that nearly 102 million people plan to shop online or in stores this Friday. Nearly 29 million of them planned to do so on Thanksgiving Day, which is when big retailers such as Target, Macy’s and Kohl’s launch their slate of “doorbusters” deals. And I’ve collected my share of anecdotal evidence that stores are still plenty busy: I’ve seen lines hundreds of people deep outside of a Best Buy, and I could swear I felt my blood pressure rising in the Macy’s at Tysons Corner one year because the store was pulsing with so many people.

2. “It’s ridiculous. It’s just a bunch of people pushing and shoving each other.” There’s no doubt that being in a big-box store for its Black Friday sale is not exactly a low-key experience. It’s busy. It’s noisy. It can be hard to steer a shopping cart through the crowd.

But if you imagine that Black Friday sales are a stampede into the store followed by a “Lord of the Flies”-esque grab for the last Star Wars toy, you’re mistaken. The big-box retailers have taken steps to bring more order to the chaos in recent years, after a high-profile incident in 2008 when a Walmart store employee was trampled to death. Walmart, for example, has separate lines within the store for different products. And once you’re in line for, say, a tablet, they give you a wristband that indicates you get that tablet when the clock strikes 6 p.m. and the sale commences. Other retailers also have systems for keeping things organized. Best Buy hands out paper tickets to people standing in line outside the store that guarantee that they get the “doorbuster” item they’ve been waiting for.

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In other words, there’s no point anymore in running or trying to elbow anyone out of the way. And that probably explains why I’ve never seen anyone do it.

So, sure, these shoppers can be high-energy. And, sometimes, they’re so task-oriented that they’re not so excited to answer questions from the woman with the reporter’s notebook. But it’s not total mayhem out there.

3. “Black Friday is a make-or-break day for retailers’ entire year.” In part, this idea is wrong because of the trends described above. Shoppers are increasingly spreading out their shopping throughout the whole holiday season instead of concentrating it on this single day. So, while surely every retailer would like to ring up huge Black Friday sales, it’s not necessarily troublesome if they don’t. In fact, this year much of the growth in online shopping is expected to come at the tail end of the season. Now that retailers let you pick up online orders in stores, and have gotten faster at shipping them to your doorstep, many consumers are expected to drop big bucks at the 11th hour.

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Also consider the following: The holiday season is undoubtedly the most important stretch of the year for the retail industry. But sometimes it seems people overestimate just how significant it is for retailers. Furniture stores, for example, drew 19 percent of their total sales during the holiday season last year; clothing stores drew 21.5 percent of sales during this time. Jewelry stores are most dependent on the holidays, with 27.4 percent of sales coming in this period in 2015. But that means that even for jewelry stores, Black Friday is just one day of a roughly 60-day period that accounts for less than one-third of their annual sales. If it’s not a monster sales day, it’s hardly something they can’t recover from.