Surviving Black Friday . . . Entry for November 27, 2007

For those of you that don’t know (mostly outside the US), Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, is the official kickoff of the Christmas shopping season. Stores open VERY early, usually 5am, with limited spectacular deals. I’ve waited in line with the other shoppers at Wal-Mart on Black Friday morning before, but this year they had such good deals at Best Buy (electronics/appliance superstore) I couldn’t resist.

I decided to sneak out the house around midnight so my sons wouldn’t know, and stashed a blanket and folding chair outside to take with me so I’d be warm and at least somewhat comfortable. When I arrived at 12:30 in the morning, the parking lot was already half full and a ton of people were lined up for about a block it seemed, and that’s no exaggeration.

I struck up a conversation with 3 young ladies that were sitting next to me after this man with a Caribbean accent started sermonizing to them and others up and down the line. My "Motherhood" instinct jumped out and I told them they should just blow people off like that next time since they were young (2 high school girl and a nursing student), and you just never know. I mean crazy people preach too.

That’s when I found out that the girls all knew each other from the Unitarian Church, otherwise known as Moonies for Reverend Sun Yun Moon. Those of you around my age might remember the Mass Unitarian wedding they had in New York in the 80’s and as it turns out the high school girls’ parents were married there.

I found it fascinating and wanted to know more about the Unitarian Church, so we got into a religious discussion. As we all sat and shivered in late night/early morning cold we talked about a lot of things to kill the time. Well, I did most of the talking since I had had several strong cups of coffee to keep me awake and I was wired.

Finally 3am came along and that’s when they started passing out "tickets" (vouchers) for the "doorbuster" specials. If you didn’t have a ticket for the item, you wouldn’t be able to buy it at that price. I wanted to buy a laptop for $229 and 160 gig hard drives for 49$ and kept hoping they would make it down to my end of the line before running out but alas! No luck.

Well I wasn’t going to leave empty handed, so I went in when the doors officially opened at 5am. By that time people were trying to cut in line and I was bitching very loudly at this one old jerk who had cut in ahead of us when the cop watching the door told me to shut up so I did, I’m no dummy. The Best Buy workers didn’t seem to care either, which pissed me off even more since we had been standing in line all night.

The store really had their shit together though, I will admit. They had passed out maps of the store and had everything really organized and plenty of employees on hand to help the customers. I found the video game console I wanted and hunted down the girls I had been talking to all night and said how much I enjoyed our talk and hoped they found what they were shopping for.

Did you get all your Christmas shopping done yet? . . .