I joined the Black Friday craziness this morning. I woke up at 5:30 am, fighting nausea, sleepiness, and my own homemade lasagna and acid reflux special sauce, to purchase exactly three things:

1. 1) 75GB hard drive, $40 after rebate, from Best Buy
2. 2) Kitchenaid KSM150 5 quart stand mixer, "50% off," also at Best Buy, base price unspecified
3. 3) Kitchenaid KFP600 11 cup food processor, $180 plus 10% off coupon, from Foley's

I came home with none of these things, nor anything else. And this is good. There were probably 6 hard units of that specific hard drive, and they were gone within minutes. I dithered a bit before leaving home, so I only got to Best Buy at 6:04am. By then, I saw some people already walking out with their purchases (which impressed me greatly). The crowd was bigger than I had ever imagined. The Best Buy was the only thing open in the whole strip mall, but the parking lots for adjacent stores were filling up when I got there. I parked two or three stores away. There was no chance of me getting the hard drive; I would have had to have gotten there by 5:30 or sooner to wait in line, judging by the hundreds already there. I saw more people waiting in line to pay than I had ever seen in the whole store before. They took up probably 10% of the floor space. They had tape and rope sectioning off the whole store and guiding (obstructing) your way. The Kitchenaid mixer was indeed "50% off," but off Best Buy's price of $400. Anywhere else the same thing was $250. With the frequent 20% off coupons at Bed, Bath, & Beyond, it was the same $200, but without waiting in line for an hour at 6am. I killed a few minutes wandering around the music section, as I had plenty of time to my next appointment, Foley's at 7am. Any interest I might have had in buying music was quickly destroyed by seeing the markup. Usually Best Buy sells CDs as a loss or low-cost leader for $12 and up, but I didn't see a single CD for less than $15. On a day like today, they didn't need music as a leader. So I left Best Buy and headed out to Foley's. To make an increasingly long story short, I didn't get the food processor. The coupon didn't apply, and the $180 was after a rebate. The same food processor can be ordered through BBB for $200 and the standard 20% off coupon applied. So I walked out of there too. By then, it was 7:15, and Black Friday was over.

The only way for the whole after-Thanksgiving sale can work to your advantage is if you make a plan and stick to it. If you are going to feel like you wasted your time by going home empty-handed, you shouldn't go at all. Someone more earnestly anti-consumer** would say, "that's when they win," but I would just say that is when you lose. There is a small fraction of items that are cheaper than normal, and many more marked up. If you end up buying something other than what you intended, you will almost certainly get something you don't want or pay too much for something that you did want. Either way, it's more of a waste; being up at 6am is sunk cost that you won't recover no matter how much overpriced merchandise you buy. Not to mention it wouldn't be worth your time to stand in line for another hour when you could just go home and sleep (like I will do shortly). Also, if you go after the store has opened, you will miss any real deals. These guys are trying to play you for suckers. They trumpet a few fantastic deals early in the morning to stir up a frenzy. I felt it. You know how Best Buy often has music playing in the music section? This time they were playing it around the whole store, and it was continuously mixed dance (of a genre known as "club" to discriminating aficionados, who do in fact exist. They were playing "Addicted To Bass" for crying out loud). I was walking too fast, getting impatient with people standing in my way, etc. That's exactly the mindset that will make you buy something you didn't come for. It's really an excellent strategy. They build up so much anticipation and tension that when (not if) you don't get what you came for, you will get something else, often several something elses. I mean, nobody goes at 6am just to shop normally; they go for the deals. But if even a quarter of the people who showed up got those deals, all of these companies would go out of business. Know what you want, and walk out if it's not there. Buy it at the New Year's sales. This is obvious, but in the excitement, a lot of people forget.

"efficiency is the key to enjoyable shopping." Yes, I really did say that once. Aloud. To another person.

such a person might have also entitled this post "consumption is a disease, and so is tuberculosis."

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