My First and Last Black Friday

Not terribly long ago, we (that is, my family and I), decided that it was time for a new television set. Thinking that we’re ready to make the leap to a larger screen format, we scoured the “leaked” Black Friday ads and settled on a nice looking model at a retailer who will, for the time being at least, remain nameless. So two weeks before the dreaded day came, we settled in with a plan in mind. Since the doors open at 5am, and tickets were to be handed out at 4am for the item in question, we should aim to get up pretty darn early. No easy feat on the day after Thanksgiving, but we hadn’t done it before, and if we get up early enough, we can do it, be there and back and in bed again.

Think again.

The first problem we ran into is that we tend to think in terms of our own purchasing technique. In other words, how many other people do we know who might get up at anywhere near 4am to get in line for one of these particular monitors? And I do say monitors, because this unit in particular doesn’t have a tuner in it (my thinking being that this will make it more attractive to us, less attractive to others). The answer? Precious few. So with that thought in mind, getting up at 3:30am should be fine. Ha.

The second problem is that my wife underwent a bit of food poisoning that night (nothing to do with our Thanksgiving dinner, luckily – it seems to have come from an outside source, where she dined with some coworkers on Wednesday – see The Great Thanksgiving Food Poisoning Virus From Hell for more details). But it means that I didn’t sleep all that well. Still, at the appointed time, I got out of bed and to the van, and made it to the store by 4am, which is exactly what I planned. So far, so good.

The only problem is that there had to be at least 200 other people in front of me. Crap.

To make matters worse, in the Charlotte region, this is likely to be the least busy of the four stores (this is pure conjecture). Still, it was 4am, I was already there, I wasn’t ever likely to do it again, and there were more people coming, so I figured what the heck. I stayed.

By perhaps 4:15am, I was ready to go. But I stuck it out.

I was wondering what happened to the alleged coupons that were supposed to be distributed at 4am, as I had seen no sign of them. Of course, the line stretched along one side of the building and around the corner. Still, while we may not get any of them, I’d like to think that we would at least see the coupon people. (We never did.)

By about 4:30am, stories began circulating about what time everyone showed up – or at least that’s what time they made it back to me. The people about 100 in front of where we were, at the corner of the building, had allegedly been there since 2:00am, and the people at the front of the line had been there since 6:00pm the night before. Okay, if 2:00am doesn’t get you coupons, that’s just ridiculous – and 6:00pm the night before is just too much time on the sidewalk. I have better things to do. Do these people not realize the value of their time?

At about 4:50am, the line began to make decent advances forward, and not long after 5:00am we were inside the store. The only problem there was that it was sheer pandemonium. Since I still had no sign of the ticket people, I went to ask about the monitor, and was told to stand in a line. After a few minutes of this, I realized this was the line for people with tickets, and found someone else, who confirmed that if you didn’t have one, you were out of luck.

I appreciate that they want you to shop, but that’s a bit underhanded, don’t you think?

Still, I was there, so I picked up a couple of cheapo DVDs since the checkout lines were moving well, and then I noticed the 80 people in line to get to the checkout lines and figured that there was no way that I would wait to save a couple of bucks on DVDs. Again, it just wasn’t worth it. Instead, I drove to Sam’s.

There, I scored a free continental breakfast, I had no competition – literally – there were about ten shoppers in the entire warehouse – and I made my purchase and was gone in a few minutes, with a couple of DVDs to boot. I might do that again next year, but no more early-morning lines for ticketed items.


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