Fri 26 Nov 2010
My Black Friday Experience
Posted by RichSlick under Rants
[2] Comments
It’s been a long time since I’ve gone shopping on Black Friday and there were a couple of things I was in the market for that I decided to make an attempt to take advantage of this year.  Of course, I’m not getting up at 5 a.m. and no one in my family or extended family did any shopping this early this time around either.  I woke up around 8:30 a.m. with a mission to get a couple of things this year.
First stop, Target at 9:00 a.m. I show up and look for an XBox 360.  I go to the Xbox aisle and all the XBoxes are gone so I ask a Target rep if they have anymore, she says yes. She goes to the back of the store and brings out a cart full of XBOX 360’s. I take one and head to the check out.  The ONLY reason I went to Target for the XBox is that it came with a $50 gift card in addition to a $10 gift card for spending more than $100.  The shopping experience was quick, pleasant and the place wasn’t a mad house and I get $60 back on a $200 purchase.
Second stop, Walmart around 10:00 a.m. The planned purchase was an iPod Touch for $229 which came with a $50 gift card. I don’t know why I bothered going to Walmart, the place was filthy, hardly any reps around, and the people acted like your typical unfed animals. Seriously, I am glad that they didn’t have them in stock when I got there because I don’t know what I would have done with that gift card because I certainly didn’t want to go back there ever again. Oh and I went to TWO different Walmarts and it was the same thing at both.
Third stop, Fry’s around 11:00 a.m. The last two times I shopped here I had the same problem, the lines are always too long and Fry’s has a stupid system of queuing people and then sending you to a specific stall to cash out.  The last two times I shopped there by the time I get to the stall either the cashier closes up or someone else gets into the same stall.  I only had an HDMI cable with me that I was going to purchase but I opted to just leave it there in a cart and walked out, no point in wasting time with a stupid inefficient electronics store like Frys.   I won’t ever purchase anything there again but I did get a good chance to walk around and look at flat panel TVs to determine which one I wanted. I overheard a sales rep pressure some poor sap to buy an extended warranty on a TV. The TV the guy is buying is $600 and the warranty he’s trying to sell him is $300. You have to be an idiot to take him up on the offer given the price of TV’s drops significantly every year. Newsflash, in two to three years there will be TV’s 10 times better and 10 times cheaper so why buy a warranty?
My observations at both Target, Walmart and Frys were that electronics were the big items this year. At Walmart, the iPads were cleared out as were iPod Touches. At Target, TVs and game consoles were selling fast.  At Fry’s the TV and computer section were fairly croweded while the rest of the store was empty.
So I only really got to purchase one thing on Black Friday and I plan on doing all my other purchases online.  No sales tax, no hassles, door stop delivery, and it’s always in stock when I order online.    I will continue with my narrative that retail is dying a slow painful death as the experience continues to get worse and worse every year.