Black Friday
It’s an annual tradition in our house to go out on Black Friday. Every year, on the day after Thanksgiving, Chrissy and I head to the local shopping malls early in the morning for the doorbuster deals. Chrissy and I are a great team, and she is an insane shopping maniac on prozac. She has our strategy planned out a week in advance. The bonus is that we usually get the majority of our holiday shopping done at a substantial savings. This year, we were in the car by 3:30 AM in order to be at Wal-Mart by 4:00 AM.
For a detailed account of our early-morning wanderings, click “Continue Reading”.
It’s an annual tradition in our house to go out on Black Friday. Every year, on the day after Thanksgiving, Chrissy and I head to the local shopping malls early in the morning for the doorbuster deals. Chrissy and I are a great team, and she is an insane shopping maniac on prozac. She has our strategy planned out a week in advance. The bonus is that we usually get the majority of our holiday shopping done at a substantial savings. This year, we were in the car by 3:30 AM in order to be at Wal-Mart by 4:00 AM. Chrissy has a long Christmas list for Aiden, and Wal-Mart had a few of the items that she wanted marked half off.
Two years ago, we went to the Wal-Mart in Schererville first and found a disorganized line, five or six people thick, about two hundred feet long. When the doors finally opened, a hundred people popped out of their hiding places in the parking lot and ran for the doors. All the people in the loose line then saw the people from the parking lot making a run for it and retaliated in turn. People from the back of the line ran up ahead, and everybody pushed forward in hurried surges. There was a sea of chaos being channelled into a single set of double doors. I’m sure that people were trampled that morning. There were news postings the next day about it, but then again, people get hurt every Black Friday and it’s all over the news.
We didn’t go back to Wal-Mart last year, but we heard from others that the store had learned from its mistakes. This year, there was a neat line cordoned off by ropes. There were four or five police cars directly in front of the building. And when the doors opened, policemen forced the people from the parking lot back and pulled line jumpers out of line. It was great. It was crazy once we got inside though, so Chrissy and I split up and found what we wanted, keeping in touch by cell phone to regroup in the right place. The cash registers in the front were packed solid, but the registers back by the seasonal department were wide open.
After Wal-Mart, we stopped by the Kohls. Black Friday is awful at Kohls, since the line wraps all the way around the store. That main aisle that goes all the way to the back of the store, then all the way across the store, and then back to the front of the store? That’s the line to the checkout. I took my place in line in the far back corner of the store while Chrissy ran around to grab everything that we wanted to buy. About a half hour later, I was getting close to the front of the store again, and Chrissy came back with the last of our items for checkout. We filled the car with our loot and headed back home.
But that wasn’t all. We had left Aiden with his Aunt Cassie for the morning. We unloaded the car, debriefed Cassie and then got Aiden ready for his first Black Friday. We went out to the Westville (Southlake) Mall in Hobart to get me some St. John’s Bay shirts from JC Penney (an annual event) and some clothes for Chrissy. We also stopped by the Meijer on the way back, but we were too tired by that point to go on. We had just enough energy to go back home again to get something to eat and take a nap. We had a full day by noon, but that’s how it is every year, and every year we go back for more.
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