This morning we experienced Black Friday for the fourth time. It became a family tradition quite by chance in 2004, when we happened to go in to OfficeMax on Black Friday for some paper clips and ended up bringing back a ton of stuff. Most of it free or nearly free after rebates. We also got a deeply-discounted LCD monitor—our first. Hot dog! The next two years brought a few more LCD monitors, hard drives, memory, a digital camera and MP3 player for Mama, and who knows what else (I don’t). Back then, I enjoyed the novelty of waking up at 5am and buying all those low-priced ‘toys’. This year, however, I wasn’t feeling the spirit.
After our Thanksgiving dinner we all gathered ’round and checked out the Black Friday ads. I hung around for a while, for tradition’s sake, but soon left after seeing no “outrageous deals” on anything I/we were interested in. Kyle and Papa, on the other hand, were all over it. They found some (admittedly pretty sweet) deals on 26″ and 32″ HDTV sets to replace our old TV which, while not HD, is fine by my judgment. Getting an HDTV would mean not only spending a lot of money on it, but then we have to seek out HD programming, lest we be stuck with the same ol’ (now blurry by our new raised standards) video. Bah humbug. (With Papa being such a Taoist and everything, I would find his disregard for this “raising the bar” principle surprising…if I hadn’t seen it many times before.)
Reluctantly but willingly, I set my alarm for 5:15am. We heated our pre-prepared hot chocolate (that was a major motivating factor for me) and the three of us left for Staples (which opened at 6:00am) while Mama slept. When we pulled up at 5:45 (behind schedule!) the line was already past the sidewalk (see first picture). A Staples employee was walking down the line, handing out tickets for the high-demand items. I got Papa to inquire about the TV, and the Staples guy said that all the sets were claimed by people further up the line, but there would be another model (same size) available at the door, first-come first-serve. I snapped a picture of him and Papa—obeying the principle that it’s better to ask forgiveness than permission—but was told I had to delete the picture (and verify having done so). So sadly, this is all I came away with:
Inside, we stood in another line until we were asked which item(s) to pull out from behind the counter. Papa requested the TV but the employee said that he needed a ticket. We probably could have left it at that and walked away empty-handed, but I stepped in and insisted that they were first-come-first-serve. See, I may not be keen on an idea—even opposed to it—but if I find that it’s actually going to be executed, I want it to be executed as efficiently and optimally as possible. (So if you’ve been wondering what’s a good way to take advantage of me, now you know.) Anyway, after checking with the manager (photo-philic guy, in fact) we got our prize: a 32-inch HDTV. It took two men to carry it out.
It barely fit through our door.
And the end result? Well… different things for different people. I call it a freakin’ monster screen. (Click this one to make it bigger.)
I am being a bit melodramatic, of course. Yeah, it’s a bit…disgusting, but I’ll get used to it, I’ll upgrade our media server to capture over-the-air ATSC signals. And yes, I have to admit that The Office in 720p is intense. But now even my 22″ widescreen computer monitor looks small. Oh great.
I passed up this black friday cuz I didn’t ‘need’ anything this year, plenty of stuff I would like but nothing I actually need. That and the fact that last year I got to best buy about 3:30 am and was so way back in the line and didn’t get what I was after because they only had 60 of the LCD monitor I wanted and the computer guy said they were all gone in the first few minutes. He said it was like a human tidal wave, one minute the pallet was full and the next all the monitors gone.
I didn’t even have to move my feet, the place was so crowded the human wave just carried me around the store. All in all, to much hassle for to little gain and be all by myself too boot, I skipped it this year. Next year may be a different story.
oh, forgot to say this … wait until you watch a HD movie on it, WOWZA, WOWZA, WOWZA so much detail.
Update: Well, we returned the 32 inch HDTV. Papa came around and realized it was a little oversized for our living room. We traded it in for a 26-inch instead.