Friday, December 3, 2010

black friday

Last week was my first "Black Friday" shopping experience and I might just hafta say that it was also my last!!

We put the kids to bed and Nathan and I ventured out to Walmart about 10:45pm to get to the midnight sales. So since I've never done this before, I figured we could pick up the stuff we needed, put everything in our cart and just check out after 12. Well, little did I know that you can't touch the stuff on sale until exactly midnight! So it seemed as though everyone that lived within St. Cloud's city limits and then some were also at Walmart waiting for the deals. At one point I asked Nathan if he wanted to ditch our cart and leave because it was getting that crazy. A couple hundred bucks is not worth losing your sanity over!! But we decided to stick it out and see what happened!

We were planning on walking around the store and doing other shopping until 12 but since people kept flooding in and standing on top of the things they wanted to grab first once midnight struck, it was getting harder and harder to move in the store, much less with a cart! If you can see the people in this picture, you can get an idea of just how crazy it was. There was people like this in every aisle and any space there was in the store. NO getting anywhere fast!


Well, midnight happened and you would hear a sworm of busyness start! We picked up the things we wanted to get ie: Shark steamer for $36, Kitchen Aid mixer for $146, some toys over 50% off, and a 14' trampoline for $145! While we were on the way to the check out we noticed that every cart we saw had at least 2 or 3 shop vacs in them so we decided to get one too! Must be a good deal, right?? :) It was a 5 gallon for $15.

So we made our way to the check outs and they had all 30+ lines open with each line crossing the once wide open space and going into the clothes section so we just picked a lane and waited. We were in line at 12:11 and got to the car about 12:50...not too bad but of course we had to be in the slowest line possible! Plus what made it worse was that I start getting really hot standing in line and then I started thinking about all the people there and about how I was hungry and then I thought about how I passed out 6 years ago when I was pregnant with Tiernan and all of a sudden I became dizzy...NOT good I thought! So I whipped off my coat and scarf and told Nathan to hold my purse (he loved that) and I headed to the restrooms to get a drink of water and get out of the sea of people. That helped and was good to go after that.

One thing that we couldn't believe was that the police were outside towing peoples car that weren't in an actual parking spot. How would you like that?...You had a cart full of stuff, it's 1am and you go outside and your car is gone! I'm sure there were a few angry people!

After we got back to Nathan's parents house, I went to sleep about 2am and Nathan's mom woke me up at 2:45am to head out again! This time it was Herbergers which was hardly better than Walmart, with every woman in town at this store! I don't think I'll go there again especially when I could order the deals online with free shipping! that's too crazy for me!

After there we hit up Toys r us...didn't buy anything though. Then over to the grocery store...And then over to Kmart, which I also came out of empty handed. But the interesting thing about Kmart was that we got there 5 minutes before it opened at 5am and there was a line of people about a block long and 5 people wide flowing out from the doors waiting for it to open. There was no way I was going to wait outside in close to below 0 weather for it to open so I waited in the nice warm car and once they opened the doors, Mary brought me up to the front, I got out of the car, walked right in and I was out by the time some of those people waiting in line were even in the store! I'm amazed at how some people think sometimes!!

We made it back about 5:30am and Mary made me an omlet before going to bed. I slept from 5:45 to 9:30 that morning. And that's enough Black Friday for me!!

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