Odd Black Friday Experience
 

Lured by the prospect of a 200GB hard drive for $30, I decided to attempt my first Black Friday shopping experience in many years.

I went to BF2005.com and built a shopping list. Some stores opened at 5am and others at 6am. I got up at 6:30 and was out the door at 6:45.

Two stores had $30 hard drives. I went to Staples first since I like their easy rebates. The Delaware store was packed, with an average of 40 people in each checkout line. The hard drives were long gone, as well as the laminator I was looking for. I picked up the power strip and corded phone, but thought that standing in line for 30 minutes for those two items was stupid and bailed out.

I next went to Compusa. The store was relatively quiet. This is because most of the good items, including all 300 hard drives, had been cleaned out. I did pick up a 4GB usb microdrive for $99 not including the $50 rebate.

Checked Office Depot. They were also cleaned out of most sale items.

Checked the Staples in West Chester on my way into work. They did not have the hard drive and confirmed that all the other Staples were cleaned out.

Decided to check on line at lunch. While I expected Staples to limit their sale items to in store, this was not the case. I picked up the hard drive on sale and an external DVD burner on sale with free shipping. It turns out I didn't have to go to the store after all.

Emboldened by this, I decided to check Circuit City on-line. As I expected, the two items I was interested in were in-store only. What suprised me was that the Exton store near work still had them in stock while the other stores had been cleaned out.

I went over to the Exton store after work and found the package of AA batteries on sale hanging near the register. There was no price tag on it, so possibly people did not realize it was a sale item.

I asked two guys there if they had the 512MB Compactflash cards that were selling for $10 after rebates. At first they thought they had been cleaned out, but then one of them remembered that they had dumped some in a pile in a locked case near the floor. The salesman opened the case and searched through a loose pile of Compact Flash cards until he came up with 6 of the 512MB cards.

So after the 90 minutes I spent with everyone else looking for bargains with everyone else and coming up empty, the items I really wanted were purchased on-line or in the evening with noone in line in front of me.http://www.cellar.org/images/smilies/tongue.gif

I did not attempt any shopping today.

Unless you count Wawa.

I bought two things on Amazon.com while in my bathrobe. Later, we went to a toy store with the kids so they could buy their presents for each other, but it was not particularly crowded.

I bought a book I had been looking out for for ages in a matter of five minutes via an on-line antiquarian book-store called Abebooks - excellent

I love shopping Abebooks, but I've only bought one book from them. I'm still recovering from the Friends of the Library booksale. Among all of the books and CD's, I got a hardback copy of Richard Clarke's "Against All Enemies" for $1.

abebooks is awesome! I've been able to find some really rare & unique books through them.

I just found a bunch of stuff there I never thought I'd dig up.

Is shopping on Black Friday really worth it? Seriously, do you really get that good of a bargain on exactly the items you want? I've found that items are usually not in stock, not what I want, only at a store several towns away, etc, etc. After hearing about the Walmart laptop fiasco, I'm convinced a lot of these tactics are illegal or damn near bait-and-switch.

I did one Black Friday some years ago and every year since, I've been glad to miss the sales and pay extra for the comfort of not having to fight tooth and nail over something marked down a couple bucks.