I have only ever attended on Black Friday shopping event at the invitation of an experienced neighbor. She was going to show me how it was done.
We (she) planned the places we wanted to attend and the items we wanted. The first stop was a home decor store. We got in line about 4 am. I got two twin sheet sets for $5 each. We went to a couple of other places, but the items I was interested in were no longer available.
The sheets were not worth the five bucks I paid for them- while the material was nice enough, the fitted sheets were too narrow and too shallow to fit the mattress properly and the pillow cases were about 2-3 inches too short to cover the whole pillow. I threw them out pretty quickly after buying them.
The whole thing was a major disappointment and I’ll never do it again.
It was a fun tradition when I was a kid. We’d go to my aunt’s in (what to us was) the big city (Topeka, KS), have Thanksgiving, and “shop til we dropped.” It was fun, and because my dad’s family tried to dominate all of our other holidays, I loved the time with my mom’s family. I got my first face powder at White Lakes Mall… sigh… I miss that kind of shopping fun.
Nowadays, well…I can only quote the meme I’ve been seeing: My loathing for humanity outweighs my need for stuff.
I ended up venturing out for butter, because I wanted to bake. The grocery store was very quiet, and it’s far from the big box stores, so traffic was fine.
I spent some time online to see what all the big deals were, and the biggest sales seemed to be on electronics and toys, neither of which I need. I looked for deals on king size sheets, but the discounted ones all had lousy reviews. Not worth it.
Even if they were giving stuff away for free there’s mo way in he’ll I’d intentionally suffer through traffic, long lines and crowds. I stayed away from even restaurants and the grocery this week.
I voted the fourth option because I almost always avoid it, but on rare occasions will go (if it’s not to some place that will be super crazy and overcrowded).
I normally avoid it like the plague. This year, though, I was visiting my family and helping my eleven-year-old nephew build his first PC. We needed a DVI-VGA adapter, and there was really no putting it off, so we took a trip to Radio Shack. It was empty.
This year, I did it. I went shopping on Black Friday. And I was the only person in the store!
Of course, I was shopping for curling shoes, which aren’t exactly mass-market in the United States. But still. I had time for a nice leisurely talk with the sales person, who was about as nerdy as you would expect a curling-shoe salesman to be. Black Friday rulez!
I don’t shop for Christmas gifts, but I do my grocery shopping on the morning of Black Friday. It’s never been crowded at the supermarket I use at that time.
One year my nephew saw some sort of game system advertised at a really good price and I told him I’d buy him one…I went into the store late in the afternoon, headed right for the item I wanted,grabbed one, then went directly to checkout.