What a crazy day it has been! I just survived a shopping marathon an figured I'd write a bit about some of the stuff I did today. Hopefully I can apply some sort of coherence to it all.
Turkey Day - Eat turkey, sleep, sleep, sleep, wake up at 11:30pm to go shopping!
Black Friday madness - Studies have been done and have shown that the majority of consumer spending doesn't actually happen on Black Friday (or Cyber Monday for all you nerd folk). Instead the Saturday before Christmas is the winner. To shatter my pre-conceptions even further my girlfriend has notified me that her store has already gotten into "the black" for the year as well. Now the name Black Friday carries next to no meaning for me. Instead I will call it Waste Money Fight Trash Angry Day.
Waste Money Fight Trash Angry Day madness - Much better. I got up around 11:30pm from my turkey coma to get ready and start shopping a bit earlier this year. The outlet mall near my home was opening all stores at midnight with great deals, prizes, and long lines. We get there just after 12:00am and already all the parking spots are filled and the Coach store has a 200 person line in front of it. Personally if I wanted to flush money down the toilet I'd buy Louis Vuitton but that's just me. Anyway we get really lucky on a parking spot and so begins our shopping adventures.
We start at a clothing store, Bass, and they are running a pretty good buy 1 get 2 free sale. At least i assume it's a good sale since the line to check out is over 2 hours long! I didn't even really look and moved from random store to random store. I ended up buying some pants for myself. Yippee my Christmas shopping started with buying myself stuff. Actually there really wasn't much good stuff to buy and most the sales there weren't that appealing to me. I just waited for my mother to finish trying on some clothes at a store called Black and White which had a 40 minutes dressing room wait and we headed back home to pick up the third musketeer in our merry band of early morning deal-getters.
This year this department store called Boscov's was giving out door prizes and was conveniently located next to the store my father wanted to buy out. So there I stood with the huddled masses int he freezing cold waiting for my prize. Strangely it seems too many years of mothering have caused my own mom to forget her own advice. She always wanted us to bundle up as kids before going outside and even offered me a scarf as we headed out. Since when do guys wear scarves? As we stood there shivering I realize that no only is my mother wearing capri-length pants but she also has no socks on, tsk tsk. Lucky for us the store came out early and handed out the prizes. I got the wonderful prize of getting the opportunity of shopping in the store for a $10 discount. I just waited 1 hour in the freezing cold for a coupon and I was happy to do so!
Since we already got our prize we immediately left the line with pretty much everyone else that got their prizes. No way anyone will wait the remaining 30 minutes in the cold for the store to open. In the time we had been waiting my father had already filled the car with stuff from the first store and was on his second trip to buy. I tried hard and succeeded in not buying stupid crap I had no use for at these department stores. Especially my father not so subtly convinced me I didn't want something because it was possible he may have already bought it. These department store really do sell a lot of crap. Chinese slave labor and lax safety laws I salute you!
In the early morning we managed to spend hours in just 2 stores making purchases at least 10 times. I did manage to find some gifts for my future nieces so it was a success for me. We moved on to the worst Waste Money Fight Trash Angry Day stores of them all. The big box retailers. We skipped Walmart which is good since I hear police were called to multiple Walmarts around the US. Darn you robotic hamsters! Darn you to heck!!!! We did, however, go to Target. Let's just say my future nieces are going to be happy this Christmas. Note to self, turn into cute grand daughter to rake in the loot. I only had one thing to get at Target and was hoping to avoid the 100 person long checkout line by coming back later but my dad had found lots of stuff so I dropped off my purchase with him and went to nerd central, Gamestop.
I don't know how they do it but Gamestop had really no good deals whatsoever and still were packed. Heck even I went there knowing this. I kept to my goal of not buying video games until next year and instead bought a gift for a family I don't even really know. Hopefully this makes up for buying stuff for myself. The line in Gamestop had maybe 10 people in it yet it took longer to get through that line than it took my father to get through the aforementioned 100 person target line. Go efficiency. While in line I learned that Old Navy now sells video games (say what?) and helped a lady find Wii stuff.
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This is a long post so deal with it!
At first I assumed she was buying for her kids but it turns out her and her friend were "getting into the Wii experience" for the first times and were buying it for their husbands. There were hopelessly confused by all the random plastic things that come with Wii enjoyment and I gave them a crash course in all things gun attachment related for the Wii. their husbands wanted to shoot things and hunt (it is Pennsylvania after all) and they were getting them the awful, awful, awful hunting games. The nerd part of me yearned to explain how bad these games were and how they shouldn't support shovelware but when I noticed the joy they expressed at getting these gifts for their families I bit my tongue and refrained from explaining to them the finer points of zombie hunting on the Wii. So for those keeping track that is 2 points for Joe at Gamestop. 1 for buying a gift for someone I didn't really know and 1 for increasing the profitability of garbage games on the Wii. Oh my goodness, maybe that's why Gamestop is so popular. It brings out the good in all of us! Oh and I am pretty sure Hurley from the TV show Lost was the guy who rang me up. 4 8 15 16 23 42 4 8 15 16 23 42 4 8 15 16 23 42 4 8 15 16 23 42 4 8 15 16 23 42 4 8 15 16 23 42 4 8 15 16 23 42 4 8 15 16 23 42 4 8 15 16 23 42 4 8 15 16 23 42 4 8 15 16 23 42 4 8 15 16 23 42 4 8 15 16 23 42
Then it was back to the mall to finish up visiting the stores that couldn't force their employees to work at 3am even though the guy who ran the Asian slushie drink stand was there with the rest of us. There really wasn't many good stores in that mall anyway so we defaulted back to the very same store we spent all morning in. After making our gajillionth purchase from the same store it was off to Lowes and then we were done. 13 hours of straight up shopping spanning 2 days. I ended up with 2 points and maybe 4 gifts total and it was worth it. Didn't get to see any fights or stores getting bashed in though. Oh well.
Tip - Amazon has most of the same deals and you don't need to brave the cold at 3am.
Tip - Seems like most stores' temporary early morning sales were "extended." Like I believe they made all new signage that morning to "extend" their sales.
Tip - Do not buy hunting games on the Wii.
Editors note: Just kidding I don't have an editor but I did edit out a lot of more specific gifts that were purchased and the more obvious places i went to buy gifts. even with Christmas lists some surprise is still fun.
