It has been a tradition that every year, I seem to go out into the masses on Black Friday, and take my life in my hands in search of a great deal and an interesting story. This one was no different than the others; stories to be found everywhere.
The Chicago news stations were covering the traffic outside the mall in Schaumburg. This is a HUGE mall, with tons of shopping on the surrounding streets as well. The place was literally causing traffic problems onto the freeways nearby, and this was a normal occurrence. Needless to say, we won't ever being going there for Black Friday shopping.
We started at the Walmart in South Haven. It's a 24 hour Wal-Mart, so when we were there last night around 9ish, they had begun to put out all of their doorbusters. However, they managed to keep people from buying them by having them shrink wrapped onto pallets, and with paper signs that said "Cannot be purchased until 5 am". I am sure that there was at least one customer who tried it, hoping to get the great price early.
We wandered in there around 8 am, as we were not getting up early just to look around. There really weren't any deals we were looking for, and figured that would let some of the more insane crowd do their thing, and allow us to look around a little easier. We were right.
This Wal-mart was different. As we walked around, there were still a lot of the door-busters in stock, sitting in the aisles. The customer load was heavier than usual for this particular store, but still much quieter than we were accustomed to for a Black Friday-type holiday. When we got to the front, there were cashiers waiting to help people, actively looking in fact. A very unusual sight.
After we finished at Wal-Mart, we headed for Kalamazoo. Almost every major shop is there, and along one street (Westnedge Ave). We wanted to get an electric frying pan, similar to the one we have been using here in our rental, and knew that we had gift cards to Bed, Bath and Beyond leftover from the wedding. They were fairly busy, but definitely a manageable crowd. We got our items there, and moved onto Kohl's.
Kohl's must have been having some of the best sales around, because the place was insanely busy. The line to purchase things wrapped from the registers, down the aisle, took a left turn toward the back of the store, and went all the way down that aisle as well. Realistically, there were probably about 100-150 people in line just on this one side of the store. And another line almost as long was on the other side of the store as well. Crazy.
We went to the Toys'R'Us across the street, and found them to be picked clean. They literally had areas of their store that looked like they had been robbed. There was nothing on the shelves in these areas.
We also went to the mall, where they had a Sears (not super busy), a JCPenney (which was just a sea of people), and a Macy's (which appeared busy as well). Not really finding much there as well, we went to Best Buy.
Best Buy was super busy, and had also taken a couple of tricks out of the Disney guide to hiding how long the line is. They had cordoned off a portion of their appliance department, and had the line running through the refrigerators, where it couldn't easily be seen. It appeared, as you walked into the store, that there was hardly anyone in line at all. Very sneaky.
Target was one of our last stops, and it was interesting to see the difference location makes. I had talked to my sister earlier, who had been shopping back home in California. Apparently she had bought a dvd player for a co-worker, that she had to nearly fight to keep once she had grabbed it. Meanwhile, back in Michigan, almost 7 hours after they had opened, there were about 10 of the same dvd player still sitting on the counter, unpurchased.
We did manage to find a couple of items we were looking for (both for ourselves and as gifts), and are no worse for the wear. And also we didn't get up as early as some of the crazy people!
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