My Black Friday Experience

Last year a gang of us attacked Officemax for its eminently useless but free after rebate stuff - and after running around the store , pushing people away and grabbing most of the stuff returned home victorious. This year - could not find that many enthusiastic people . And at this time of the year - Gainesville is always a dead town - so I thought whoever remained would invade Bestbuy first and reached the local Circuit City just half an hour or so before the store opening hour. And whoa! I found myself behind a hundred or so people! It was sheer madness once I entered the store. Here my extensive "research" for the past couple of days came in handy (thanks to http://www.bf2005.com/ - it was so helpful). I knew what I wanted ( not those amazingly cheap crappy laptops - they were all apparently "out" by midnight!) - but still missed that free Samsonite camera bag or the computer screen cleaner. And to add insult to "injury" , I ended up in perhaps the slowest moving checkout line in the entire country.
That led me to change the "itinerary" a bit - instead of heading for another round of jostling , went to an unusually quiet Sams Club and grabbed the free breakfast ( as someone famously said - there is nothing like a free lunch, but I dont mind free food anyplace anytime!) they had. I was anyway too sleepy by then - staying up the whole night and waiting to place orders online at the right times was clearly taking its toll. But still could not resist the temptation to be at our only mall - did not really find anything too tempting then though. Its another story that I went back to the mall later in the evening after having a good sleep!

And I realize, I actually enjoy the early morning madness!

Black Friday !

Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving in the United States, is historically one of the busiest retail shopping days of the year. Many consider it the "official" beginning to the holiday season. The "black" in the name comes from the standard accounting practice of using red ink to denote negative values (i.e., losses) and black ink to denote positive values (profits). Black Friday is the day when retailers traditionally get back "in the black" after operating "in the red" for the previous months, often by cutting prices considerably. In addition, most retailers will open very early. [Wikipedia]

So we are there again. The day the consumers are supposedly the king - even if they have to wake up early and get into literal streetfight with complete strangers to grab the mostly useless but deeply discounted items. And one day when "black" something is not a politically incorrect phrase! Or is it?

( I found this somewhere in the web - could not resist putting it up here. No copyright violation is intended!)