People are crazy

Marty and I need a new computer. Our computer is like 5 1/2 years old and isn't really working all that well. It works, but it works sloooow, making our high speed internet kind of moot. Sadly, our computer only allows me to blog one out of every three times I try. So we've been looking around. We decided we are going to get a laptop and maybe get a low price desktop to replace what we currently have and then go completely wireless. We found one we liked and Marty saw it on sale at Best Buy. We went over and BOOOOO, the sale ended the day before and it was $150 more expensive. Marty refused to buy it and made it his goal to find the best deal possible on the new computer. And then the Black Friday ads came out.

Best Buy's add had a ton of stuff on sale. We had no interest in the $200 computer. I don't know how they had this special anyway. It was a pc, 17" widescreen monitor, keyboard and mouse. The screen alone is probably worth $200 and they had this whole bundle priced at $200. The ad said every store would have a minimum of 15 of them. The crazy deals like this were labeled as "doorbusters" and it said right on the front of the add that tickets would be given out at 3am for the doorbuster items and the doors would open at 5am. There were a lot of computers on sale, but the one we were interested in was a laptop that was the most expensive computer listed in the ad. We are not morning people, so we never had a plan to go to the store on Black Friday.

Our Thanksgiving tradition is to eat dinner at Marty's brother's house. We then drive to my sister's house where we drink and play poker all night long. For some reason, Marty looks at me at 3:30am and says "If we stay awake another hour, we can hit the Best Buy." I was not that crazy about the idea, so we weighed the pros and cons. The pros won. The computer is $250 off and the closest store to my sister's house is actually in deleware, where there's no sales tax, which would be another $70 cheaper than buying it at home. $320 is quite a bit of savings. We decided to go for it.

Now, the store opened at 5am and we got there at 5:30. There was still a line to get in. There was a line just to get in the door! Crazy. And there were state troopers there acting as crowd control. So we waited. We finally get in the store and had to get into another line, the computer line. I have to say that Best Buy was really well prepared for this madness. They had the ends of the aisles blocked off so that there was a weaving line that led to the counter in the computer section. Meanwhile, people are frantically grabbing printers, digital cameras and the like all around us. A very pleasant woman rammed me in the back of the legs with her shopping cart and then said "Oh. Excuse me." She then rammed the man in from of me in the back of the legs and said "Oh. Excuse me." I was on to her game so I tapped the next woman in the back and said "She's gonna ram you in the back of the legs with her cart and than say excuse me, so you should really get out of the way." She thanked me and the shopping cart lady looked away, refusing to look me in the eye. After standing around aimlessly in this line for about twenty minutes, Marty asked a store associate if we were in the right line and yes we were. He said it would take us forty minutes to get to the next associate who would be better able to tell us if they still had our computer. Claustrophobic people would have been totally fucked. I swear this was the most crowded I have ever seen a store.

We got near the second associate and he is making this announcement over and over "If you do not have a ticket, you will not be able to get any of the computers in the Black Friday ad." This was not what we wanted to hear, so we tried to think our way out of it. Sure, our computer was in the ad, but wasn't a doorbuster. The ad said the sale was on Friday and Saturday for our computer. Surely they have enough to last both days. Maybe they would still have one? We looked around and no one around us was holding tickets. Marty asked the couple in front of us if they had a ticket and they said they didn't. He said "Well, that guy just said if you don't have a ticket, there are no more computers left from the ad."

The woman said "Well, we didn't see the ad, but he found the computer that we want online."

Marty said "I think if it was online, it is probably in the ad." So he pulls the add out of his back pocket and starts to show it to her. "Was it this one?"

"No. It wasn't a laptop."

"Was it any of these?"

"No. Not any of those."

"How 'bout this page?"

"No. None of those."

I see Marty shuffle the pages around and get this gleam in his eye. The evil Marty gleam. The one he gave me when I asked if people can see out of glass eyes. He points to the ad and says "This one?"

"Yep. That's the one."

They were waiting for the $200 computer. Marty laughs and says "That's WAAAAY gone."

The couple looked at each other all confused and start this big discussion amongst themselves. Meanwhile, my husband is hiding behind the ad, laughing his ass off, and mouthing things like this to me: "How fucking stupid can you be? I want to smack them. There are 250 people in line in front of you. Didn't they think maybe some of those people would want one of the 15 $200 computers?" It was hysterical. We gave up and got out of line at this point and admitted to ourselves that we weren't getting our computer. The couple was still there when we got out of line. We think they thought we were lying.

We took the long way around the back of the store before we left because Marty was considering getting a DVD that was on sale. As we are passing the appliances, Marty says "They must be giving away stuff in appliances. Look at the line over there." It snaked up and down aisles, even worse than the computer section. And then he really looked at the line and noticed that a lot of teenagers were in the line and they don't want washers, dryers and ranges. Marty walks up to the associate standing at the end of one of the aisles and says "Is this the checkout line?"

The associate nodded and said "Yep. See the balloons at the back of the store? That's where the line begins. Takes about an hour and a half."

An hour and a half to checkout???? I looked and Marty and said "No DVD's. No amount of savings is worth this much of my time." How crazy is that? I cannot believe people are willing to do this. It made me so mad that I've decided that all of my holiday shopping will be done online. I will not go to even one store! Online I will not get rammed by shopping carts and I won't be surrounded by stupidity. On the ride back to civilization (we decided that Delaware does not count as civilization), we promised each other that we would never ever ever even entertain the idea of shopping on Black Friday again. Although, I must admit that the super stupid couple did make for some great comic relief.