So I did it. I went out for Black Friday shopping last night.
Well, sort of…
After we ate last night, the whole family ended up going out for a bit of the madness, and admittedly it was kind of fun! For what it’s worth, we did leave pretty late – we probably didn’t even show up at Best Buy until around 10pm, so it’s not like the whole adventure impacted dinner … if anything, it provided a much needed break in between dinner and dessert, actually! 😉
Anyways, a couple of thoughts about Black Friday:
#1 – I think that it sort of gets a bad rap … sort of.
I mean, don’t get me wrong – trampling is bad and if you’re one of those people who’ve been caught on tape being crazy, then you’re an asshole and you need to re-evaluate just how much a $5.99 DVD player is really worth to you.
But crazies aside, I do think that Black Friday serves a greater purpose because it gives people a chance to stretch their dollars farther in order to get more presents for the people that they care about. I’ve heard of many people who feel that they have to go shopping on Black Friday because it’s the only way that they can get things for all of their kids, or that Black Friday is how they’re able to justify getting that one big gift for the whole family like a new TV or a computer or something.
And I have no desire to get into a debate about the true meaning of Christmas, be it biblical or simply just not focused on presents, presents, and more presents.
I personally celebrate the commercial spirit of the season, and Black Friday allows that to flourish a bit more than usual, so if you have a problem with that, blame the economy, not people who go out shopping in the middle of the night in order to fill their kids’ wishlists that year…
Now that said, #2 – I also think that the slow creep of start times is getting kind of ridiculous.
This year a lot of the sales started at 6pm on Thanksgiving, which as far as I’m concerned is still prime turkey eating time! Now luckily it kind of worked out for us because we had little desire to be there the second the doors opened (aka Crazy Time), so heading in at 10pm gave us time to finish dinner and play a game of cards before heading out, and by then the initial crazy had pretty much died down when we walked into Best Buy. There were still a lot of people inside, but the line outside was like 10 people deep for some XBox One promo or something, so it wasn’t too bad.
Ultimately our excursion only took us to 2/3 stores – Best Buy and Toys ‘R Us/Babies ‘R Us – and we were back home by something like 1am, but I still feel for all of the retail workers that had to go in super-early or miss Thanksgiving entirely in order to support Black Friday and I kind of wish that there was at least a little sentiment that Thanksgiving Day Proper be left to family and then maybe sales kicked up at midnight or 5am the next morning or something.
As it was, the TV that I wanted from Best Buy had been on sale all week and the guy cited that only one model was even going to have tickets – the rest we could come in and get any time, and if they were out, they could order them for us at the same price. In fact, my whole take was honestly pretty simple and didn’t require much going out of my way whatsoever…
- AppleTV – I’ve wanted to play around with one of these things for a while to see about finally setting up a home media server and Best Buy had them for 15% off, so I logged onto BestBuy.com shortly after 6pm and ordered it no problem.
- 2nd Desktop Monitor – They also had a monitor similar to the one I use now on sale for $99, so I ordered this at the same time as a predetermined Christmas gift from the wife.
- New TV for Bedroom – This was the only one that posed the slightest challenge because it sold out online and they didn’t have any in the store because apparently they don’t even stock the model I want in the store! That said, I went up to customer service and asked about it, and somehow they were able to put one on order for me anyways that will be here sometime next week!
- Misc. Toys & Baby Stuff – Honestly, Toys & Babies ‘R Us were basically dead by the time we showed up and it was more a chance to point out some of the stuff on our baby registry to family than snag any huge deals. We still grabbed a few random things anyways – a couple of kid gifts, a few things for the baby, and a couple of Wii games for us just because they had Mario Galaxy 2 for $30 and we didn’t have it yet. Sadly, Toys ‘R Us is typically kind of overpriced anyways, so nothing monumental here, but I still like walking through there because toys are fun, and as an added bonus, it’s always amusing to listen to parents go, “What the hell is a Skylander?! I don’t know – I think he wants the blue one…”
Not sure if we’ll stumble out to any other stores for sales throughout the weekend. My main point of interest at this point would be Legos, and most of the Lego sales are crap this year. We used to scan all of the cheap DVD sales, but I’ve been trying to steer us more digital anyways and we never even bothered to unpack our DVDs from when we moved last summer to boot! Maybe we’ll go looking for some decorations, though … trying to get the abode a bit more whimsical on account of soon having a child to celebrate Christmas with us, so that’s probably a pretty good excuse for lights and garlands and all sorts of Christmas whimsy spending around here!
Because apparently I’ve turned into Martha Stewart now.
Whatever. Say what you will, but the bitch knows how to build a centerpiece that will put your grandmother’s to shame. To shame!!! 😯