I have been pondering over these things before every day-after-Thanksgiving aka Black Friday sale day. This time you can ponder with me and save some money in the process :)…In the following, the words ‘you’, ‘I’, ‘we’ are all synonymous.
1. Not everything is on sale on Black Friday.
2. You don’t “need” everything that is on sale.
3. WRONG: Looking at all the sale offers first and then deciding what to buy. RIGHT: Deciding what you need and then checking if those things are on sale. This might be very subtle for some of you, but I have observed that this is exactly where most of us fall. If you look at the sale offers first, you are sold, you will end up “creating” a need for something enticing, cheap and stupid.
4. Generally, all sales are for one sole reason: to give exposure to products that usually don’t get sold easily. 
5. The really good quality stuff that you really need is very rarely on sale.
6. Even if you do find some quality stuff you need on sale, it is not necessary that you will be able to find (read grab and wrestle) it before other people. Remember, the good stuff always gets sold first.
7. Checkout lines in all stores suck BIG time on this day.
8. Most items on sale will be offered with mail-in-rebates, and some crap always happens to mail-in-rebates (well at least in my case)
9. If I were to put a price on my sleep, those few extra hours of sleep that I could get look more promising than the few bucks that I would save by not sleeping the whole night.
10. If you show me how much you saved by waiting in a line for the whole night, I will show you how much you could have saved by sleeping through the night, not waiting in the line at all and by not buying stuff you don’t need.
11. I might wake up early on Black Friday, not to buy stuff but just to drive by those winding lines of sleepless folks and to chuckle at the ultimate stampede and chaos that occur when the doors open. That will be some free and live entertainment which is really worth the trouble.
Well, enough grim thoughts from me. What do you think about this Black Friday stuff?
[Image source: http://www.adbusters.org/ : don't know who these guys are...just liked the poster]
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Here’s my number 12. It never seems worth the effort after I see the item I was thinking about buying.
Last year because of novelty, I did a lot of shopping staying up all night. If you care, the log is at: http://ghatotkatch.blogspot.com/2005/11/thanks.html
This year, I am giving it a miss for other attractions down South.
But from my experience, Black Friday is the best place to purchase things that you don’t need for you, but to give to folks back home as gifts. Available products are not the best, I agree. But again, if you get a 1 GB SanDisk USB flash drive for $9.99 (and instant rebate, no mail-in rebate) or MP3 player like Sansa at $39.99 (mail-in rebate here) or reasonably good digital camera for under $200, why wouldn’t you purchase it? They happy, you happy
Super Saver: yeah ..that sounds like my story too.
nku: I like to be a “no-presents” man….well at least I yearn to be one. At times, for purely strategic socio-political reasons I buy some gifts for near/dear ones :), but electronics don’t make that cut. The thing about electronic gifts is that men have very strong preferences in what kind of stuff they like, and women simply don’t care about these doodads. But that’s just my take.
I am sure, some wise people make good use of the black friday sale :), so I don’t intend to generalize things too much here.
I stay home on black friday. Yes the prices are good, but the stuff is not stuff I need. But I have been shopping on Black Friday in the past and I will buy everything thinking It will never be this cheap again. So, now a try to plan better and shop throughout the year and if I can’t find what I want to buy that person, I will get them a gift card.
I just posted on Black Friday on my blog. Reminds me of the Roman Circus at times.
I have a friend who was up with her kids until 2 am on Thursday night, slept for 1.5 hrs, and then got up to go stand in line at Best Buy. I think it was about 35 degrees outside that night. She stood in line until 5 am, did her shopping with the hundreds of other people who had been standing in line, and then went to work for 9 hours. And then went home to take care of her kids (a 2 year-old and a 3 month-old). I don’t even have kids and I value my sleep a lot more than that.
I’m a gal from Canada and though we don’t have “black Friday” here, we do have “Boxing Day” sales (right after Christmas on Dec.26th). Funny thing about about Boxing Day sales is that on Dec. 27th they turn into “Boxing Week” sales where you can find the same, picked-over clutter for the same sale price, or lower, with 200% smaller crowds. And the jist of Boxing Day is the same as Black Friday; people line up for hours, flock in as the doors open like they’re at an IKEA grand opening and the sales are only so-so. I did a little shopping this past Boxing Day (found nothing but a wrong-sized shirt I didn’t try on after noting the change room lines were comparable to amusement park queues) and wished I’d spent the 1 of my 2 days off work for Christmas relaxing by the fire and chilling with family… I’ll be smarter next year.
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