Wednesday, November 30, 2011

Post Thanksgiving Day Happenings



That means Black Friday sales of course! I hadn’t planned on any major purchases for Black Friday other than some DVD disks at Radio Shack and perhaps a wireless printer. But first, let me tell you about how I was rear ended by a truck. As I was driving to the store and while stopped at a red light, I suddenly felt something hit my car from behind. It was a huge moving truck whose driver probably underestimated the braking distance. I pulled over at the next turn to check the damage thinking the truck driver would do the same. He kinda did but continued to drive away slowly. I checked my rear bumper and only saw a few light scratches. The bumper itself was intact so I gave the truck driver a thumb up sign that everything was A-ok. I hope he didn’t perceive it to be the middle finger. That truck was so high that the bottom of its front bumper hit the top of my rear bumper, thus the scratches.
 So I got rear ended on the way to a Black Friday special at 8 a.m. To make matter slightly worse, the Radio Shack half a mile away from home was out of the DVD disks that were on sale. Off I go to the one two miles away and in the store I saw a guy picking up the last two packs of the disks, or so I thought. When he saw that I was envious of him getting the remaining disks, he kindly gave me a pack. Turns out he was a Filipino and he told me he had just driven from Fry’s Electronics but the lines were too long. As he paid for his DVD disks, I asked a salesperson if there were any more. He went back to the shelf and showed me that there were a few packs left that were covered by some other products. Well, the ones that the Filipino guy gave me were DVD-R while the salesperson gave me DVD+R. They made no difference to me since both work with my computer and DVD player. The Filipino guy said DVD-R’s work better in all machines. As I approached the cashier, some HP printers on half price sale was blocking my way. I read the features and decided to get one of those too. $76 for 2 packs of 75 DVD disks and a wireless/internet printer. Not a bad deal. That was the extent of my Black Friday purchase, and done at a store that was not crowded.
On Saturday morning, I had goal oriented run/walk. It consisted of running to Winco Grocery store, checking out any green tag deals that I would find appealing, then running back home. I managed all of those other than finding anything I might want to buy later. Too bad they haven’t had a repeat of the pre Halloween special of hard candy for 99 cents a pound. On my way out, one of the cashiers and the security guard were eyeing my suspiciously. They were probably thinking “what is this sweaty man doing in the store without buying anything? Was he obtaining a five finger discount?” Well, at least I got a 50 minute run in (4 minutes of running and 1 minute walking then repeat). For a cool down, I walked half a mile back home.
When Cyber Monday arrived, I checked out the Tigerdirect.com website and saw that there was a special on laptop memory: $14.99 for 4 gigabytes (with a $10 rebate). I wanted to buy two of those but kept putting it off until the sale expired. Thank goodness! I felt I already spent too much on Black Friday. After all, my laptop was already fast enough and didn’t need the extra memory. On Cyber Monday, I didn’t fall into the category of buying a product just because it was such a good deal to pass up. I skipped the small business Saturday sales. Oh, I didn't get pepper sprayed either.

What about you? Did you do any Black Friday and/or Cyber Monday shopping? Actually there was some other thing I bought online last Saturday but I’ll have to tell you about it some other time.


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