William Reardon’s Blog

Showing particularly poor taste in naming, today is what the retail industry calls “Black Friday.” Unlike Black Thursday (which marked the start of the Great Depression) and Black Monday (the stock market crash in ‘87), this Black Friday is a good day. (However, not to be confused with Good Friday — something altogether different.)

The reason for the black adjective this go round, has nothing to do with the stock market at all. Rather, for most retailers, it marks the start of the Christmas shopping season which helps push most retailers to the point where they are making a profit for the year — where they finally go into black. Growing up this day was simply referred to “The day after Thanksgiving” or “The start of the Christmas shopping season”, but apparently that was too simple to understand, so Black Friday it is.

While the long, long lines & huge shopping crowds are probably familiar to everyone, probably less familiar is the early morning ritual a select few perform on this day of bargain hunting. It involves waking up anywhere between 3-4 am, putting on the warmest clothes you can, and standing in sub-freezing weather for several hours waiting for the store of your choice to open. If you’ve ever wondered why that long-sought-after-finally-on-sale item was no longer available by the time you got your lazy ass up and off to the store, these people are why.

This year, based largely on impulse, I joined my brothers, my brother-in-law, and some family friends in waiting in the Best Buy from roughly 4:15am until they opened at 6am. And it was cold. And not just because I live in California, but really, it’s was Midwest cold, hovering around the low 30s when we left & certainly dropping in the following hour. Throw in a steady, strong breeze, and you have enough to test any man’s commitment to getting a bargain.

Was it worth it? In a very strange way, yes. It’s a fun time & freezing in-line with everyone is a good shared experience. The deals are pretty damn good. I have plenty of unused disk space, so I passed up on the chance to get a 140 gig drive for $50. Likewise, I didn’t need a DVD-R drive, a scanner, a graphics cards, or a new desktop, but had I, each one was better than anything you’d find on- or off-line any other time of the year.

My bigger ticket item this year was a Samsung 17″ flat-panel LCD monitor. Like almost all purchases this year, this one was an impulse, but probably the best justified as my current CRT is well over six years old. Best of it, while it normally goes for $480, I got it for only $280. Less defendable was getting the Mintek 5” portable DVD players for $150 (normally $200). I still may return it, but then I wouldn’t be able to watch Anger Management or Chicago DVDs ($11.99 each). Ah heck, even if I do I can still listen to Madonna’s Immaculate Collection or the Beatles 1 CDs ($9.99 each), possibly as streaming mp3s that I could store on my 64 meg thumb drive or on some DVD-R discs (both free).

Of course, the big catch with all of this, is that the discounts come in the form of rebates, something I’m traditionally not strong at following through on. I suppose I could fill them out now, but it’s late. Maybe I’ll do them tomorrow.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 28th, 2003 at 11:40 am and is filed under non-sequitur. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.