Black Friday Recap

09Dec07

This is the third year I’ve gone out for Black Friday, and the second year that I’ve stayed in line for 10+ hours to get the best items.  This year we went to Best Buy again, to wait outside from 7:00 PM Thanksgiving Day till 5:00 AM the next morning.  Let me just say: you haven’t been camping until you’ve camped on the asphalt in 16°F weather.  This year we brought a tent, which was a huge upgrade to last year’s chairs, in which we just sat and slowly froze throughout the night.  The only way we could stay somewhat warm in the tent was to lay in a sleeping bag with a minimum of three blankets over us — and you have to be covered head-to-toe.  Take the blankets off your head and suddenly you get awfully cold.

However, the worst part is right before 3:00 AM.  For reasons I can’t comprehend, they hand out tickets (the doorbuster tickets that allow you to purchase the items you’ve been waiting for all night) at 3:00 AM — two whole hours before they can even let anyone in the store.  So at 3:00 AM, you have to take down your tent and everyone makes a dash for the front of the line and chaos ensues.  People skip, people get angry, people start to yell and swear.  The bad part about it, however, was that we no longer had our tent or our sleeping bags, and we had to stand there for a couple hours with absolutely no feeling in our feet at all.  We got the tickets we wanted though, so that’s all that matters.  And then you get into the store…

When you go inside Best Buy on Black Friday, the entire store is roped off in a seemingly random fashion.  You can’t go anywhere you want, and you quite literally get herded around like a flock of sheep.  You have to go to certain sections of the store and turn in your tickets to purchase whatever it is that you came to purchase.  There are different sections for different goods (TVs, computers, car equipment, etc), and each section has a line that can last well over an hour if you’re not quick about getting to where you need to be.

I could go on, but I think you got the gist of it.  If you’ve never stood outside a store for ten hours in the cold and are just now learning about this phenomenon, it may sound like a terrible idea.  However, the deals are well worth it in the end.

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