Am I the only person who thinks that the whole Black Friday sales thing has gotten completely out of hand? It used to be that stores would open at, say 8am on Black Friday instead of the usual 10 or whatever it was and you got some sales. Now it’s been ratcheted up so far that stores like Wal-Mart were just plain open on Thanksgiving itself. Pretty much every store opened at Midnight for the Black Friday frenzy. On the way home from my mom’s house, Nadine and I saw that both a Best Buy and a Wal-Mart were jam packed with humans. I mean, what deal is so good that it’s worth all this?
If you’re any sort of savvy shopper, you’d realize a few things. First, those things they put on super ridiculous prices, like a sub-$200 flat screen TV? They usually won’t have any more than say four of five of each in the store. So unless you’re the idiot that camped out since Tuesday, you’re not getting it. Those crazy deals are really just to amp you up and get you into the store to buy the regularly priced stuff. Secondly, those products are of shoddy quality, especially the TV’s. Did you know that most TV makers have something like eight or nine different TV lines from super budget to so fancy it should just think for you? Those Black Friday deals are likely a subset of the cheapest line they have. Maybe it doesn’t matter to most, but you won’t get a lot of good features that are in the new electronics these days.
Beyond all that, when it comes to regular, non-eletronics, you do realize that you can usually get better deals on a lot of things on other weeks leading up to the holiday? Retailers are so pushed to make things happen that they’ll really ratchet up the deals as they get closer to get that sale.
And even further on, you can almost aways get better deals online. Amazon is a wonderful marketplace for a reason. Which is really the future of everything. So let’s get with the program and just stay home after we eat that Thanksgiving dinner and enjoy ourselves.
(and yes, I totally ripped off that headline from Think Geek)
