Black Friday

On Thanksgiving afternoon (I was stuffed) I went through every last flyer in the Washington Post. I ended up with Best Buy and Staples as my target. (not to be confused with Target, whose sales weren't as good) I set my alarm for 4:33 AM after I calculated that that would give me three snoozes. I finally got up @ 5 and took a shower. The whole house was up by this time. Mom and the girls and one of their friends were going to the mall, Benji and Tony were going hunting, and Dad and I headed to Best Buy. Here is Best Buy at 6 AM, after they had started letting people in:

I rushed for the $599 LCD projector (1500 lumens). They were gone. Next I pushed my way over to the hard drives. I grabbed two 160 gb HDs for $30 bucks a piece after rebate (limit 1 per person). Next I got two 40-packs of DVD+Rs for $3 bucks a piece after rebate. As I went to get the DVDs, I noticed Vonnie Nisly's head in a long line of people waiting for something. I didn't have time to say hi. Next I went looking for the photo paper that was 70% off. I heard someone yell my name. I turned and there was Merv Stoltzfus. He was standing next to Vonnie. They were both in line for some laptops that were $499 (regularly $1000). Dad called me on the cell phone and told me that they were out of the digital camera tickets when he got there. He went up to the service desk too see about something else. (The looong line that I told you about? It was going to the service desk. He came from the other direction) A young kid was working the service desk (Stores hiring more temporary holiday help than last year) and Dad asked her for two of the digital cameras. She didn't realize that you had to have tickets for the cameras; she gave dad two of them and he paid for them. Merv came over to the service desk as well, and got his laptop without a ticket. He told me to run and tell Vonnie to get out of the long line and come to the service desk the other way and the girl gave her a laptop too without a ticket. Merv got one the digicams (4 megapixel: $150) as well. The girl's manager finally caught on that she was giving out stuff that was reserved by tickets, but she had already checked us out, so there was nothing they could do.

Next Dad and I went to Staples (fortunately in the same shopping center). They were out of the $30 dual-layer DVD burners and the $30 160 gb HDs. They still had the $3 40-packs of DVD+Rs. The lines were so long:

(can't see very good here, but those 3 aisles were filled with people all the way to the front)

and we had other shopping to do (Lowes), so we got two packs of DVDs and went back to the desks section and stuck the two packs of DVDs in a desk drawer. We went up to the service desk and asked the guy (older guy) if they had any HDs or DVD burners left. He said, "Yeah we do." And started to hand us a HD. Then he saw a little reserved sticker on it and said, "Oh. These are reserved." He put it back. Then he got a DVD burner whose reserved sticker (only a piece of plain paper taped to the box) was facing away from him. He handed it to me sticker facing me. I held the box close to my chest and was starting to walk away. Dad then made the mistake of asking if we could check out right away. This attracted the attention of another employee who said, "Hey! That's reserved." I reluctantly handed it back. If Dad wouldn't have said anything about checking out, we prob would have got it... Grrr...

We went to Lowes and got 6 poinsettas, 4 coffee makers, 4 crock pots, and a reciprocating saw.

We then went back to Staples and went back to the desks and found our DVDs undisturbed (the ones on the display were gone). We checked out with short lines (only 5 or so people) and went back to Best Buy. We went to double check that they were out of everything that we wanted and to make sure no one had returned anything or anything. No luck. In the process I found out from an employee that sneaky Best Buy had only had 3 projectors to start with!! I went ahead and picked up two 512 mb SD memory sticks for the digicams that we got. I then went to check out and encountered these lines:

Again not very good pics, but the line wound back and forth through 5 aisles or so, and then along the whole front of the store.

I went over to the service desk where the line was significantly shorter (about 10 people) and checked out there. As I was standing in line, which fortuitously ran through the PC Gaming aisle, a guy pushed past me. I politely told him that I'm in line. He glared at me and said, "I'm not trying to get in line!! And I'm having a bad day..." as he trailed off into a snarl... I meekly stepped back and let him give the games a few short angry glares before he stalked off. About this time Dad came into the store (he had forgot to use a 10% off coupon @ Lowes and had went back to get it retroactively on his purchase) and noticed an excellent deal on some eMachines: $199 including monitor. He assumed that they were all gone, but checked anyway. They had started out the morning with a couple of hundred. All but ten were gone, but the ten that were left had been reserved by people getting tickets. The people had 'til noon to claim them. Dad knew the people at the service desk pretty well by then and he talked the computer section manager into letting him have one before noon, when the leftovers would be offered to the general public. This set off a stream of angry Hindi or Telegu (or some Indian language) from an Indian (Asia) that had been waiting by the service desk for hours and had been promised by the employees behind the service desk he would be first in line for an eMachine at 12. So the manager gave him one too. Merv called and asked me if I could see if I could get him an eMachine. I had told him about not getting the HDs at Staples. He said he had got a HD at Best Buy cuz it was such a good deal, but he didn't know what he was going to do with it. So we did a trade. He gave me the HD and Dad wrangled another eMachine for him. We had to call Mom, who had the van, to come pick up these two computers and monitors (CRTs) because the car was full of saws, flowers, and coffee pots. Later we went back and talked another employee into giving us two more eMachines (we sent the rebates to different addresses of course): one more for Merv and one more for us. So in the end we got 4 eMachines plus monitors, 160 DVD+Rs, 480 GBs worth of HDs, 2 digicams, two 512mb SDs, and some photo paper, plus some other stuff (I listed the important stuff; my sisters got perfumes, fuzzy mufflers, and all sorts of junk at the mall and Dad got the aforementioned stuff at Lowes...)

We ended up the day on an appropriate note: Ordering two value meals at Checkers and having them reject our buy one get one free coupon because it was expired. We were satisfied that we had saved enough that day and were too exhausted to do otherwise. We took them anyway (unusual for my dad).

What a day!