Whats your black Friday deal?

[Jedi Master Thrash]

Up until a year or two ago, I always thought "black friday" referred to the evil of the day. The angry crowds, packed stores, fighting over 5am deals, jammed parking lots. I thought it was feared and scorned by retailers everywhere almost as much as by shoppers.

Turned out "black friday" meant it was the day retail went from being in the red to black on the profit line (ok, so I'm stupid). Retail looked forward to the day as a blessing, their one day to make or break their stock options for the year.

So it was supposed to have a good connotation, and I always assumed it was meant to have a bad connotation. Shows how out of touch with reality I am.

5 to 10 years ago there used to be worthwhile deals to be had the day after Thanksgiving. Stuff you actually wanted was on sale. Electronics and hot items would be free or less than 5$ after a dozen different rebates. Other big items would be up to half off. Best Buy used to have all CDs 3$ off. Legos and star wars would be 20% off. 20$ DVD players.

What happened? In the last 5 years, it just gets worse and worse. They now more heavily adversize and proclaim their "doorbusters" and sales, but the sales are actually pitiful. Only 5 top-hit CDs will be on sale. Save on these select crappy DVDs. 10% off all board games! Save 100$ on this 2000$ LCD TV.

Nobody is going to sit in line at 1am and bust down the door for 10% off of board games and 5$ off Britney's latest CD. About the only door burster I saw was Best Buy had an 800$ laptop on sale for 400$.

Still, I ended up going shopping anyway, because my Wife had to take the car to the shop, so we drove the loaner to MOA which was nearby the dealer for the day until it was done.

LegoLand at MOA had a gimmick for the day. You get a scratch-off with a 10%, 25%, or 50% off your whole purchase. But both the ones my wife and I got were just 10% off. They also had bags of legos from destroyed boxes for 7$ each. Good deal, but I couldn't bring myself to pick just a couple bags.

Hi-Score Video Games kiosk (3rd floor, south-east corner) had buy 2 get 1 free used games. But I didn't feel like spending 60$ just to save 15$. They had enough 100$+ games (saturn & CD RPGs) you could get a good deal if you had some cash.

Then I went to Southdale to check out the Games'n'Go. That one didn't have nearly as much stuff as the Rosedale and Brooklyn Park ones. Not too much on the hot side. But they did have buy 1 get 1 50% off used, and 10% off all new games.

So I guess my black friday deal was getting 10% off of the walking AT-AT at LegoLand (and I can sell my non-walking AT-AT from the prior year on e-bay). FYI, I picked up a minty complete Time Gal for Sega CD at Hi-Score.

 

[Amon]

Well being from Canada and not wanting to fight the traffic I am waiting to the canadian eqiv to black friday... boxing day sales!! But way to score man!

 

[VertigoXX]

Yeah, Best Buy's Sony Vaio laptop for $400... They only had six of them. The line in front of the store had over 200 people in it at 4:00 AM. Their $6.99 for a spindle of 100 blank DVD-R's? One box of 18 packs. So I ended up standing in line for over an hour in the snow to buy a 2 GB Micro SD card for $20 and a copy of SSX for Wii for $15.

Then I went down to HH Gregg. Got right in the door, grabbed a $40 (after rebate) DVD/VCR combo and a $10 (after rebate) DVD player, then spent over an hour standing in line to check out, then another 20 minutes in line waiting to leave (they have to check your receipt at the door). What little I saved there, I could have made more in the same amount of time by going to work. :-\

The Target and GameStop by there were too busy, there was a line of cars just waiting to get in the lot. Gamestop had a line over a 1/8 of a mile long hoping to get Wii systems. I said f-it and went back to Massillon. Gamestop there had a line for Wii's just barely out the door, and everyone there got one (except the loud annoying lady who had plugged the line with her sister, daughter, and two sons trying to get a bunch of them, GameStop figured her out and only let them get one). They also did the buy-two-get-one-free deal on used games, but the prices varried so much on newer stuff that I couldn't be bothered. I got three GameCube games off a $4.99 and $6.99 rack. Then I found a complete series set of Space: Above and Beyond for $1.99. Buy-2-get-1, so I picked out two other $1.99 DVD's, Indecent Proposal and The 6th Day, just for the hell of it. Then I raided the $2.99 UMD movies, and got a large pile, including Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Labrynth, Dark Crystal, and MirrorMask (which I already owned, but I paid $15 for a used copy and was pissed that if I'd waited a few months I could'a got it new for $3) along with some crappy Sony horror and action movies. Most of the other good ones I'd bought when they first did the $4.99 UMD deal.

From there, to the Massillon Target, where I was at least able to park and navigate the store. Most of the games that had been listed online as being marked down were not, they only had 4 titles marked for $9, all of which I either had for another system or didn't care about. I did pick up Street Fighter 3 something or another for PSP off the clearance rack for $4.29.

At this point I realized that I'd been up for more than two days without sleep and hadn't eaten since dinner the day before, so I got a coffee bean and chocolate concoction at the in-store Starfuckers (hate giving them money, but my bloodsugar was low) that had enough sugar and caffeine to get me home.

Once home, I went online and got the best deal of all. Free shipping store wide from Super Media Store. I ordered 500 double-disc DVD cases for $135. Granted, I needed 1000, but that'll get me started cleaning up these spindles and getting the discs labeled and shelved.

Then FedEx arrived with my new M3 DS REAL Perfect Bundle set from Diveno, and I was done shopping, time to start playing.

 

[Malakai]

I too kind of thought the sales this year have been weak. Granted, there were a few all-in-one printers at wal-mart that I would have bought, but we got up too late for any to be left.

A lot of the stores were advertising those digital picture frames between $49 and $59, and some of my family members were mentioning wanting to get some of them. Did they get some? Who knows?

What I did on black friday was go to the hardware store, bought some supplies, and then did some work on my new place. Wal-Mart was packed. So, we didn't even stop.

-

I've kind of been wanting to get a wii but can't find any that aren't in bundles, and don't even think about Ebay, because they're $200+ over retail there.

Maybe wednesday I'll go into one of the larger towns and browse through kmart, 2-3 wal-marts, bestbuy, target, radio shack, circuit city, etc and see if we can get lucky. It about isn't worth it though. Damn gas prices nearing $3.20 a gallon.

 

[mtxblau]

I was hoping the LCD tvs would come down in price more than they have... last year, I picked up a $400 for $180 at Circuit City. It's a 24" sylvania, we like it a lot.


I didn't go out this year - you could buy most of the stuff at black friday prices on ebay, amazon, or newegg. Apparently this is the first year where clothing was a bigger seller than electronics.


As for the Wii - it's funny, but last month we were in New York, and there were several hundred in the middle of the electronics section at ToysRUs in Times Square (we only went so that we could take the daughter on the ferris wheel). I had contemplated buying one and marking it up for the Christmas season, but I never go through with these stupid ideas.