You'll find me baggin' on Black Friday

T'is the season for sales, sales, sales. At this time of the year, every store starts lowering the prices on their merchandise so that they can attract more business. Due to the struggling economy however, the end-of-the-year savings have started a little earlier. Every store wants as many people as they can get to walk in for the savings and walk out with more stuff and less cash in their pockets. The biggest day to save is Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving. Every retailer has their most enticing merchandise lowered to "must have" prices. Then they start the sale ridiculously early in the morning so people have to wake up before the crack of dawn just to get to the store and grab the sale. But when you get to the store there is already a line. So you have to wait outside in a line full of pushy, crabby,cold people who all want the same thing you do while still trying to fight off their turkey comas from the night before. To recap, you are standing outside in the freezing cold, pushed against complete strangers, working with very little, if any, sleep at all before the sun has even begun to rise.

If you happen to be one of the lucky, or crazy, few who has managed to make it to the front of the line, as soon as those doors open you have to literally run around the store like a mad man to get what you came for before the store is sold out. If you are at the back of the line, you are out of luck. Most stores only have a first come first served basis on Black Friday and will not issue you a rain check. If they offered rain checks it would slow down the cashiers while they wrote it out, which would in turn cost the store money. And if rain checks were issued then no one would get up early to get the sale and Black Friday would become just like any other Friday, well people might actually sleep off some of the food they ate on Thanksgiving. Also it would be a good idea, if you are planning to shop on Black Friday, to make a plan of where you want to go, and persuade as many family members into helping as you can.

Most of the stores will open within an hour of each other. Your job is to do your research and find when the best deals start. Start with the store that has what you want the most because, like I said, they usually don't issue rain checks. If you have a lot of people in your family it would be a good idea to plan with them so you can send people to multiple stores. This will increase your chances of getting the cheep stuff. For example, send mom to the mall for the sweaters and scarves, dad to Wal Mart for the HD TV, Aunt Tilly to Best Buy for the ipod touch, and Uncle Jim can go to Home Depot for power tools. Don't plan on going to too many stores in one day because you will have to spend at least half of your time in line at the registers also.

To add to the holiday madness, some stores are opening their doors on Thanksgiving day. For those who wish to spend time away from their families on Thanksgiving, they have the opportunity for an extra day of savings. Beware though, the stores will be just as bad on Thanksgiving as they are on Black Friday. To everyone who will be shopping on Thanksgiving and Black Friday, Happy Hunting.