Yesterday I discussed different ways to enjoy a frugal Thanksgiving. Now that you’ve got your bases covered for Thursday, what to do about Black Friday?
Black Friday marks a few things:
- The beginning of the Christmas shopping season.
- A day of sales and door busters to promote shopping.
- The name “Black Friday” came to be commonly referred to as the day after Thanksgiving from the Philadelphia cops describing the massive traffic incurred in Center City.
- Most stores do make profits all year round. But there are stores that do rely so heavily on the Christmas shopping season that it is truly when they get “in the black.”
Pretty exciting, eh? Over the past few years, I have developed a Black Friday ritual as follows.
The Week Before
For the week or two before, I will see if there are any deals I am remotely interested in. To do this, I use a few different resources:
A lot of the information is redundant, but the websites are set up a little differently which make each of them useful. I like to use Slick Deals the most because of the thriving community. They will go over all of the deals and say if they are actually good or not.
Slick Deals also discusses alternative deals for people who don’t feel like waiting in line for the BF deal. If you head in to the normal part of the website, you can search for some pretty awesome deals as well. I’ve seen a few alternates posted where the $89 camera is pretty much $105 right now if you use promo codes. For $15, I choose sleep! ;)
The Day Before
I typically have narrowed down my list to a few items, if any. Staples always has good deals on blank CDs, blank DVDs, thumb drives, and paper shredders. I need another thumb drive and my paper shredder has kicked it, so I’ll probably head there this year.
I’m also looking to see if any GREAT digital camera deals exist, because mine has been dead for a year or two. We’ll see.
Once I know where I want to go, I’ll coordinate with a few friends or family members. If I want 3 items from Staples and they want 3 items from Staples, I can get them all. That frees their schedule up to go to another store and get other things they want (plus anything I want). If you do this with enough people, you can scrounge up quite a lot of the deals with minimal effort.
The Catch 22
When I was in high school I found myself going just to go. I didn’t need anything in particular. But once I got to the stores I would pick something up just because everyone was grabbing at the items on the tables. I still have a reel of CDs from a Black Friday a few years ago.
Live and learn.
If you look up the ads and you don’t need anything… Enjoy sleeping in. Seriously.
Alternate Black Fridays
Times are changing. In the past 5 years or so (it seems), online Black Fridays have taken off big time. Instead of having to go into a store, you can just login to the website at whatever time they state and purchase items for discounted prices.
You need to be quick. I’ve seen laptop deals sell out in less than 5 minutes once they start taking orders!
Good Luck!
Happy shopping!
Do you have any pointers or rituals you’d like to share? Do you sleep in or head to the stores at 1am?