Black Friday Wins Again

Yes, I enjoy a deal. And yes, I like the thrill of the hunt early Black Friday morning. But I have this friend...who will remain nameless....no he won't....JAC loves Black Friday.

Him: Coming over to plan out our strategy?
Me: Yes.
Him: Don't forget the ads.

So I show up after two Thanksgiving dinners with my arms full of ads for stuff I don't need.

Him: You know...Compusa opens at 11:59. That's in two hours.
Me: I don't know. I'm really tired. There wasn't a lot I wanted.
Him: Come on. We've got to.

So, I found myself riding along on some sort of suicide mission. I thought I heard the Imperial March playing somewhere in the distance...naw....couldn't be. I laughed at the line. No way am I getting out and standing in the cold for 10 minutes. Oops. Wrong again. We were about 150 people back and they finally open the doors just before my face goes numb. JAC and I shop for about 30 minutes. I picked up some printable DVDs, clipart software, and a wireless mouse. JAC has his wireless keyboard and mouse but (sigh) no Bluetooth thingy-ma-bob that I still don't understand.

We were pretty happy and despite the redneck guy pushing the Asian guy, the crowd seemed pretty tame. We got in line with our goodies....and stood there....not moving...for oh....15 minutes. No worries, folks. After all, there's a lot of people and we can all just take our turn to check out. But then, well, things didn't seem to be moving at all. An hour later, we had only moved a couple of feet....if that. I decided to go investigate.

Four open registers. Four flipping registers were open. Are you kidding me? There were 500+ people in the store and only four flipping registers were open. One of them, register #5, was broken.

I tried to be cheerful. "At least we're warm." "At least we have the money to buy this crap." "At least we got a good deal." But by the time hour #2 rolled around, my patience was spent. I was sitting on the floor trying to think of something to be thankful for but man, I was tired. We pleaded with the management to do something. They laughed at us. Some people threw their baskets of essentials at the management and walked out. We applauded them for "sticking it to the big guy" and then ran to the basket to see what they left behind. Scavengers.

I was downright insane when 3:00 rolled around. The line inched slowly to the register #4. We were so close... Then, some lady had a problem with her credit card and while she was checking out, took a 20 minute phone conversation with the credit card company. I had had it. F-bombs started flying out of my little, Christ following mouth. All the while, register #5 mocked us.

We left at 3:30 a.m. I was spent. JAC thought we should just head over to Best Buy. I looked at him with a growl. "Okay....time to take you home." I wanted a bagel though so we headed to Meijer. Their sale was going to start at 5...which was in an hour. I was blindly led around the store while my friend searched under the covered sale merchandise. Finally, around 5 am, my head hit the pillow. I missed the rest of Black Friday but clearly, it had won.