I thought for sure I'd have more time to blog. But between a client getting the Vundo trojan and some other critical problems the posts are not as frequent as I would like. Then there was black friday. I was smart this year and skipped the 11:59 madness at CompUSA. A friend who went said that there were 100 people in line by 10pm and over 500 by midnight. I chose to play Scrabble with my parents and go to sleep at a reasonable hour.
I also skipped the 5am at Best Buy. Yes I wanted to get one of the 26 inch Westinghouse TV's to use as a monitor as well as one of the cheap 19" lcds, but I knew that would be a zoo, too. KYW radio said that there were 500 people in line at the King of Prussia Best Buy when it opened. You had to be at the front of the line ( which started at 10pm thanksgiving night ) to get the good stuff. Mother Nature also had her say on the shopping frenzy and took the temperatures down into the single digits. You really must want something to stay in line when it's that cold. I can see the lucky first shopper being interviewed on TV --" I got a big screen tv and a laptop and , oh yeah, frostbite on my nose. But my HMO covered it with a 5 dollar copay."
At 5:05 the pda rang ( no alarm clock because I was visiting the folks ) and I flopped out of bed. I grabbed a piece of pumpkin pie, drank some Diet Coke and greeted my fellow adventurers for the trek to Staples. We went to a rural Staples to avoid the crowds and got in line around 5:40. We were about 20 people back from the front of the line. Not bad for getting all that "extra" sleep. The people in front of us were refugees from the Best Buy line. The people in back got to the Best Buy at 3:30, but were so intimidated by the line, they stayed in their car and came over to the Staples at 5:30. By 5:45 the Staples employees had finished their coffee and had assumed their battle stations.
At 6am, the line moved in an orderly fashion into the Staples. The Black Friday sale stuff was mostly right in front of the service desk. I grabbed a cart on the way in and snagged most of the items I wanted right away. I had to ask for the 2gb jump drive, but everything else was just out to grab. The lines were long to get out and I felt like I had the slowest cashier, but we were all checked out by 6:30. I thanked the guy manning the exit for coming in early and we were gone!
Then from the Staples to the CompUSA, which did not run out of its specials overnight. I was even able to grab a 1gb sodimm for my laptop, all that wireless stuff and a cantenna. We were out of the CompUSA by 7:46!
Then to the Best Buy where I snagged one of the 19" Mag monitors. I'm not sure how I managed to do that.
Circuit City was next. If you knew what you were looking for, the specials were still there, just not where the labels for the items were. Then to Office Max and back to Best Buy. My phone rang while we were waiting in traffic to turn back into the Best Buy. It was John who asked when was I going to get to Best Buy jokingly. I told him in two more cycles of the traffic light. I met him inside and we looked at other things while my relatives loaded up on more christmas presents. While we were there, they cut off the line for the before 12:00 specials. The black
friday madness was over. But not really...
Now for the remorse. Time to fill out all the rebates. Thank you Staples for the easy web rebate online system. This took care of 6 of the 8 Staples rebates. The Best Buy monitor also had an online rebate. This online rebate thing is making me lazy. The 14 rebates from CompUSA all have to be mailed. The strange thing is I only bought 7 items at CompUSA and I know at least one of them didn't have a rebate. Does this make any sense? The post office may be the only ones that makes money on the CompUSA rebates. Oh, one more rebate to do from Office Max.
All that said, the deals this black friday were more rebate based than previous years. In some cases, the item was higher priced than normal and rebated down to a good price. So, shoppers fill out those rebates. And get ready for those stores to open even earlier next year. By then I may even forget about how much of a pain it is to fill in all these rebates and maybe I'll see you in that line at the Staples.
