shopping the dark away
puttering around just after midnight this morning, i drove by a best buy with a non-empty parking lot. weird. slowed down and saw a line of tents and huddling cold people. ha! stupid fucks, says i.
drove to another town (coincidentally, also with a best buy) and checked bestbuy.com. they were to open at 05:00, but begin passing out “doorbuster” tickets at 03:00 for typo-suspicion discounts on select items. WTF — if i wasn’t doing anything, i thought i’d swing by and see how bad the line was. went to denny’s and had, believe it or not, a surprisingly good vegan dinner, with great service (first time there since i went vegan). rolled out at 02:50 and made it to best buy right at 03:00, to see what tickets survived that far down the line then probably leave. but after a while i was enjoying the challenge of pretending it wasn’t 40 degrees out. by the time i wanted to go, the hour i’d spent seemed like an investment. hadn’t been to an early morning sale since the 70s, and it’s been probably 20 years since i ventured out into a shopping area on the day after thanksgiving.
the best buy people were great, keeping the line informed, wearing out their voices walking up and down, spreading news, and actively discouraging line breakers. when i made it into the store, there were probably already 200+ people inside (i’m worthless eyeballing crowds), and it was surprisingly calm, even though people were hurrying here and there. had noted a few things from the online flyer but nothing that required buying, so i just cruised around enjoying the weirdness of a packed store at 5 in the morning. fun as hell, and the deals were insane. they weren’t fucking around, these best buy people. the execution was spot on too; they’d adjusted their system specifically for the sale. the huge checkout line snaking throughout a tenth of the store went very quickly. nice job.
rather than the expected bait-switch bullshit, they had far more of the sale items than the limited tickets indicated. taking my time and thinking through every buy, i stocked up on cheap-ass $5 DVDs, and the 5th season of Curb Your Enthusiasm, at the stellar price of $16.99. throw in a low end garmin GPS (kickass, BTW) for the auto-voiture, a couple of super cheap backup gizmos (including a 4GB flash drive for $27.99), a cheapo 2GB MP3 player/recorder, and that’s good shoppin’!
November 24th, 2007 at 00:27
Curb!
Okay… okay… okay…
November 24th, 2007 at 20:19
even when curb sucks, it’s [insert 'pretty good' sequence, however it's spelled, then you can look me in the eye if you don't believe me].