Black Friday like never before..

Got up today at 6.15 AM. This year, for some strange reason, i wanted to see what Black Friday was all about in Seattle. Reached Frys by around 6.50. There was not a single parking spot. For those familiar with the Frys parking lot in Renton, imagine how many cars would it take to fill the whole lot. Finally found a little spot to park and went in. What i saw inside knocked my breath away! every aisle in Frys had a portion of the queue. The serpentine queue extended from the checkout stands all the way through the XBox area, around the cafe, through the small electronics, into the PC components and a did a few crazy loops around the graphics cards area.

Of course buying the bulbs for the kids bathroom was out of the question. Get in the line, and you would be looking at 2 hours of shuffling towards checkout. In fact, you could do all the shopping you wanted right in the queue. Just get in the queue with an empty cart, and pick up the things you want when the queue reaches each section :-)

Anyways, did the usual rounds at the CPU and Motherboard section, left a few pools of drool there, and the remaining drool at the Camcorder section. Got out in about half an hour, happy to be alive and without the need to waste 2 hours to save 10 bucks. It also looked like people didnt care if the things they bought were on sale or even whether they saved money. I bet if people analyzed the savings they made, they might as well have gone and flipped burgers at McWhatevers to earn more than that in two hours. Some people were smart though. They pulled off whathever they wanted from the shelves and just went and sat at the cafe. They would probably chill out there for a few hours until the queue thinned out.

From Frys straight to Best Buy. No crowd there (not a real one anyway). But then the two things i was interested in either wasnt marked down or was sold out. I wanted a Blu Ray player (out of stock) and a zune (same old price as a week before).

From there to Circuit City. It was looking more like Bharat City, packed with people from good old India. I think CC would have done better had they put Bollywood movies on the display TVs, they would have sold millions of TVs.

Anyways, by about 8.30, i staggered out of there, exhausted, relieved that i had nothing to buy on Black Friday..

Never again

-g