Black Friday Part 1: The Experience

Today, I bring you a two part post on my Black Friday.

It’s only 9:30 AM and I’m exhausted! My day started shortly after the turkey dinner last night, scavenging through the ads, circling, highlighting and organizing. On the short drive back home I started my mental game plan. I had 4 stores to visit and only 2 hours to do it in.

I got my dad to watch the kids for us so our day started at 4:00am with the alarm clock going off. By 4:15am we were out the door and the kids were dropped off by 4:30am. The rat race finally began and we jetted off to my first stop Walmart.

We arrived at around 4:50am and the doors would burst open 10 minutes later. This is where things go tricky. There are two lines, one to the main entrance that was about 3 city blocks long and one to the garden center that was about 1 block long. We opted for the garden center line which incidentally put us right next to the main doors. It’s just the way the line backed up. Doors burst open, our line doesn’t move but the main door is getting flooded. We said screw it and jumped the line into the swarm of bodies. It was MADNESS I tell you. I snatched up the 4 things we came for and made it through the checkout and back to our car from start to finish in 20 minutes flat! Sweetness!

Next stop just a few doors down was Target. The line was crazy long and we couldn’t figure out why. Evidently those morons didn’t open until 6:00am. It was super freezing cold outside and like a dummy I wore nothing more than a ski jacket. So we ditched the 40 minute wait and headed over to our third stop, Meijers. We only had one item on our list for there so we ran in to find the store practically dead. I was a little confused because the parking lot was packed, but as we made our way to the toy section we clearly saw why. All of the doorbusters were being distributed to people in a single file line. WTF? These people are nuts, the whole point of a doorbuster is to make a mad dash for it and grab what you can. There was no way I was hanging out in that ginormous line for a maybe. Back to Target we go!

This is where things went badly. We still had a 15 minute wait until the doors opened and were stuck in the cold line wrapping almost entirely around the building. After freezing my toosh off until 6:00am rolled around we quickly filed in and split up. I gave hubby the toy ads while I went to find the cookware. Stupid, stupid, stupid…did I mention stupid? TARGET! When you have an advertised doorbuster for half price, it might be a good idea to actually have it on the FLOOR! Nope, not them. I had to wait 20 minutes for a stocker to get the cookware out of the back. I had a group of people standing with me waiting for 1 of 10 sets available. I oddly noticed the cookware set I was looking for hidden behind the wrong item. I looked at the girl next to me who was waiting before me and pointed it out to her to take it, I would wait. I think I really made her day because she was soooo happy not to have to wait any longer.

I finally catch up with my hubby and we realize the line to checkout is about 20 isles long, snaked around each isle. Crap! We had to be back to get the kids in 20 minutes and this was at least an hour wait. I decided to leave hubby there and go get the kids. By the time I made it back with them, he had made it through the checkout. See my nifty little diagram below for the hellish line he had to endure. Boy do I owe him big time!!! Oh, and did I mention this was my husband’s FIRST Black Friday experience? Yikes!

So that wraps up our 3 hour shopping experience. Overall it went pretty darn well! I’ll be back in a bit to update with our great scores!