Any nice Black Friday, Cyber Monday, or any deal, please post here. Discussions entertained.

This pretty much exactly sums it up:

:weary:

People have actually been trampled to DEATH by shoppers trying to get a “Deal”. I’ve learned to make sure I have groceries to last through the weekend after Thanksgiving, so I don’t have to go to the store for ANYTHING. For me, Black Friday is another relaxing day after Thanksgiving where I get to relax, enjoy visiting family, and eat the leftovers from the day before.

Depends where you live/what stores/when you go. I’m sure my experience in the midwest is different than other places.

I go Black Friday shopping every year, even if I don’t have anything I really want to buy. It’s one of my family’s true “traditions” and I love it. Some of my fondest memories with my brother are from shopping in the early morning madness of Black Friday. It is a bit of chaos just because of the mass of people, but I have never seen any violence or even really any anger any of the times I have gone. For what it’s worth, by 9-10am on Friday the stores are usually pretty quiet, just a little messy and you can shop normally.

Online shopping is how you do black Friday right.

Screw the crowds.

10 years ago or so I was almost in a mob turned riot on a black Friday.

We got there real early, think around 1 or 2 AM, we were the 3rd or 4th people in line and it was FREEZING (well actually it was in the high 40’s but a sharp breeze that was still one of the coldest I have ever been).

Well as the hours ticked by the line started growing, They opened at 6am and by 5am the line was 3-4 people wide and you could not see the back of the line unless you stepped way out of line to look.

As 6am neared people started to get a bit overcrowded, the line was stretching around the corner of the store and out of site (it was at least 100 yards to the end of the store). Then new arrivals started to try to jump the line and thats where things started to get serious. There were maybe a dozen people trying to shove their way into the front of the line with excuses like “I just want a video game, nothing like what ya’ll are wanting”.

As things were getting more and more heated the Police were called and showed up just in time to calm a full on riot (and thankfully one guy took a punch and didn’t fight back, that would have ended everything).

Then the doors opened at 6AM as the police were still trying to camp everyone and we were told the line was all the way to the back of the store and still growing!

Well we got in at this point and entered a new type of mad house, we found our items and were ready to check out in 30 minutes, sadly that was 10 minutes too late. The lines for check out grown in those 10 minutes from reasonably long to wrapping around the ENTIRE store! Not joking at all.

First you had to literally find the end of the line, this took way more effort then it sounds like, then once in line the trek had just begun.

People are going to think I am making this up but I am telling you, it is 100% true, the line for checkout weaved up and down every other aisle of the store. You could quite literally walk in the store, get in line and do your entire shopping while moving down the line to check out without having to hardly leave the line. It was a great way to check out other items you were thinking about along the way.

It took us somewhere between 2 and 3 hours to move through the line, we lost track of time.

When we finally did leave the store we were shocked to find that the fire marshal had stopped letting people into the store until someone left the store. So the line was STILL wrapping around the building when we left! They said there were over 1000 people in the store at opening and I think that was conservative.

That was the craziest black Friday I ever had. The next year this store had a fraction of the deals and everything was very well controlled but we were still in and out in less then 10 minutes lol.

After that we decided that the internet black Friday deals were just as good or better and have just done that ever since save for a few deals we could not pass up.

TA what store was that?

I remember going to a home furnishings store one year (Nebraska Furniture Mart) and it was just as you described, checkout lines were almost impossible to find the end (they starting using balloons to mark the end of lines after that) and the wait to checkout was 2hrs+. So we just went into one of the home theater demo rooms and watched the original Star Wars in its entirety, then came out and checked out after about a 30min wait.

I’m sure now that kind of experience would put me off, but as a 14-16yr old kid I loved every second of it. Love the memories.

This was the first and last time that Frys had a 6 page newspaper spread with deals truly too good to pass up lol.

This was also back in the days of mail in rebates and lots of “free” items. We cleaned up that year since we always got our rebates.

Texas_Ace, you remind me about 6 or 8 years ago at Fry’s of Arlington!

Yep, that would be the place. Thought it was a bit longer then that but could be wrong.

Small world, course it felt like the whole world was there that day lol. Drove forever to get there too, didn’t even get to really sleep that night.

Once time, it cost me more than one hour to drove in and out of Fry’s parking lot only! lol.

If you had the black friday spirit you’d be out in 30 seconds

A reverse image search proves that video is not from Black Friday (it’s too bright outside!)

But lets not make it political :wink:

Nothing political, just a wink to the trampling spirit of black friday, btw no one in this image got seriously injured, tough people.

Sorry, I wasn’t trying to say you were being political, it was more of a pre-warning for anyone who searched the image like I did.

Black Friday here in Panama is gettting crazier every year. Because we don’t have the huge US chain stores like Target Walmart or bestbuy, people would line up outside the shopping malls instead of the stores, except that there is technically no line but just a bunch of people grouping and pushing each other. They would go the mall as early as thursday night in order to get as close to the door as possible. Some people don’t even know which store they’re heading to and what to buy, they just believe everything is gonna be extremely cheap.

Reports says 50,000 foreigners from nearby countries came here on the Black Friday weekend just to shop. It’s a lot of people when the country population is just 3.5M.

This video was taken last year at one of the premium and more expensive brand name malls, others were far worse.

Haha, I have no Black Friday horror nor happy experience to share since it’s not ‘celebrated’ in my country, but perhaps some of you might find this interesting:

Eneloop AA and AAA, with the good BQCC-17 independent-channel charger plus some spacers and carry-case:

https://www.yugster.com/deals/74328-panasonic-eneloop-rechargeable-battery-power-pack-with-8aa-2aaa-2-c-spacers-2-d-spacers-charger?utm_source=Publicaster&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=TOSS-UP%3A+Jabra+Sport+Buds%7c+Panasonic+Ene

George Romero anyone?

I thought the same thing! The first real horror movie I seen

First time I heard about the analogy between zombies (in the mall) and consumerism, I was like hey ok yeah I see the similarity there. Now, many years later, I take a sip of red wine and cynically think hey George, you were 100% right from the beginning… You were 100% right… The art of getting older (lmao nevertheless ;-))

Relax, you’ve got 3 days for this one.

dchomak,

And we would say about ‘fill in the company name’ selling ‘extraordinarily cheap tools’, “AT THIS PRICE THEY WON’T LAST!!” (literally).

I have Harbor Freight screwdrivers, sockets, and wrenches that have lasted me for years. I’m not a pro making money off my tools - if I were, I might pony up for Snap-On.

The trick is to know what tools from HF are fine to buy, and what to run away from.