Oh What Fun It Is To Shop

This year I joined the masses in what is known as "Black Friday". For those that don't know, Black Friday is the day after Thanksgiving when all the stores have crazy mad sales in hopes that they'll sell out of everything so that all the employees of the stores don't have to work again until after Christmas. At least that's what it seems like. Why else would these people willingly arise at 3 am so that they can deal with irate customers for the next 12 hours? There's even a rumor going around (that I just made up) that they change the motto "The customer's always right" to "the customers always fight" for this day.

The reason I believe it's called Black Friday is because that's the color of the sky when you're participating in it. Since I am a night owl, I opted to just stay up and occupy myself playing video games and watching the pilot of Alias (that's quite a pilot!) So at 4:30 AM, I headed south to the South Hill Circuit City, where they were selling $300 laptops and $150 video cameras, among many other things. Unfortunately, I forgot that I needed gas, but I was running late so I nervously drove all the way down with the gas light glaring at me and the needle buried below the "E". To make matters worse, I drove past the 512 off-ramp and had to turn around. There was a Shell station right at the next exit, so since I really didn't feel like running out of gas at 5 am, I pulled in and filled halfway up. Meanwhile, my friend Jen calls, wondering where the heck I am and tells me they were just opening the doors and she is in line. So I race up, find a parking spot at 5:03, run up to the front of the line which is moving like an army of zombie lemmings, and to my dismay, do not see Jen. She must've just gotten inside. There's a security guard there, but I tried blending in with the rest of the crowd and sneaking in anyway. No such luck, I get spotted and am told to go back and wait like everyone else. So I do, and I soon as I get to the back, the line stops moving. Great, they're only letting in people a couple at a time now. So I wait outside for 20 minutes in the freezing cold darkness, which is exactly what I was trying to avoid by showing up right at 5 (and I would've, if not for my missed exit/gas fillup).

Anyway, I finally get inside, and all I see are more lines, tons of them. At least it's warm in there (almost too warm). And yes, there are great deals...we probably "saved" over $300 on goodies (including $140 on a Samsung mini-DV camcorder which got great reviews on Amazon) at Circuit City alone (we also checked out Target, WalMart (agghhh!), Fred Meyer and Costco). But overall, it's just not for me. What's ironic is most of these deals can also be found on the store's websites, so rather than waiting in lines forever and fighting psychotic people, you could just wake up, click the mouse a few times, and then go right back to sleep. Although, there you don't get the humor of watching people trying to load their carts with 42" Plasma HD-TVs...but I'm sure you could find something equally entertaining on YouTube. I'm glad I went this time because I got a little bit of my shopping done and was able to hang out with Jen and Trinity one (possibly) last time and get them a birthday/going away/Christmas present. But after this, I'll leave this style of ludicrous living to the masses of morning mall-loving lemmings and let my mouse do the shopping.