Black Friday -- Yes, I Did...

Got back home at 7:30 am this morning having been at three stores for some Black Friday shopping (yes, I was at a store at 4:00 am). I avoid the stores with the mega-crowds and the ones where people camp out all night hoping to get one of the limited number of low-priced big-ticket items they carry to get people in the door. I heard people were lined up around the entire exterior of one local Walmart. The line at BestBuy was also very long when I drove one of those. Tonight I heard on the news that one man was actually trampled to death at a Walmart opening this morning. Yikes!

Rather than looking at the most popular stores or the mega-electronics places, my strategy for Black Friday the last couple of years has been to aim at some stores that were on the smaller-scale or not as electronics oriented. I also try and find locations that are not in the giant shopping centers. That way, the lines (if any) are usually a little more manageable.

So this morning at 4:05 I was at a local InkStop that had opened at 4:00 (no waiting, about three people inside) and picked up a 7" digital frame for $29.95 (the lowest price I saw among all the Black Friday ads) I scanned the other specials and picked up a few other small items that will fill out the Christmas gift list. It was close enough to opening time at other stores to keep going.

I then drove over to a Home Depot where they had a nice deal on Ryobi power tools (a low-price combo kit along with a bonus free choice of another power tool). I figured that most people would be out for electronics or clothes and hopefully no line would be waiting at Home Depot. Sure enough there wasn't, and then they opened the front doors a little early. The employees there were really very helpful and cheerful, and showed me where the specials were. In fact the free tools were selling at more than the free combo kit, so I ended up getting two of the combos and two free tools -- the cashier was amazed since their register showed the amount I was saving totaled more than I was spending. I figure the second kit can go on ebay, and make the second tool really free or close. I also picked up a few other small-ticket items like a tool box for less than $5.00, a 100-piece drill-and-driver set for under $10, and four poinsettia plants for 99¢ each. The upside of my Home Depot visit was that I got some great deals -- the bad side is I lost some excuses for jobs that need doing around the house...

On the way home I stopped at a local Staples where I'd stood on line last year for a Navigon GPS (and was happy I did). By the time I got there today the store had been open thirty minutes, but most of the Black Friday items were still available. I got a fax machine they were selling at $59.99 with a $50.00 rebate (hey, I needed a new fax machine anyway, so getting one for $10.00 strikes me as a good deal, an external hard drive reduced by over 50%, and some blank DVDs that went from $26.98 down to $4.98 after a sale price with a rebate tacked on. I also picked up Norton Internet Security that will be free-after-rebate (never pay for security software, just time your new purchases right and you can get them free). I had asked a manager a couple of times for locations of some items, and I must have treated her nicely because all of a sudden she brought me a 7" digital picture frame with a wood frame that had been the hot seller of the morning for $49.99 with a $10.00 rebate. They had flown off the shelves but she said she had found the last one in the back so she offered it to me if I wanted to buy it. So I ended up getting the hottest item even though I hadn't been on line there are 6:00 am when they opened...

Well, I hope I did my part to help jump-start the economy!