Black Friday!

Today on Aly and Molly's 12 Days of Christmas Blog Challenge the topic is Black Friday / General Shopping Tips and Tricks.




I need to preface this by saying that I am not a serious Black Friday shopper. I can't get myself up earlier than probably 5 am, nor do I want to. But my goal is to shoot for the early morning, after the serious shoppers who get there when the store opens are gone, and before everyone else wakes up. Now this does mean that you miss out on some of the best deals, but you can still get some good buys this way. Also, just because you get there when the store opens doens't mean that you will be guaranteed what you set out for.

Last year we had been saving up for a new tv. The tv we got when we first got married broke (can you believe that? It was only a couple years old!) We saved up our dollars for the Black Friday sales and came home with a pretty good deal. The first thing we did was check out all of the ads for every store that sold tvs. We made a list of the brand, specs and prices of all the tvs that were in our price range and size/quality range. The key here was to be flexible and not have our hearts set on one specific tv. We found that we could get generally the same tv at several different stores for around the same price.

Next we came up with a game plan. We looked at which stores were close to one another and plotted our course so we could go from one store to the next until we found one that had a tv left in our price range. We had about 5 or 6 different stores that we could go to.

We also enlisted help. Derek, my mom, my aunt and myself went. This way we could split up and quickly see if the store had what we wanted, and one person could go find a sales associate to help, etc.

We ended up getting our TV at Best Buy which was the second store we went to. The TV we ended up with wasn't even one that we had seen advertised, which is probably why they still had some left by the time we got there. It was a little more than we planned on spending, but it was a better quality TV. We still have yet to see a TV that is the size and quality of ours for the price we got it at.  So the key points here are to go with an idea of what you want in mind, but be flexible.

After buying the TV we headed to some other stores to do some general shopping. My advice for that is to have one person stand in line while the others shop. You can rotate out so everyone gets a chance to shop, but the lines are so long that if you wait to get in line you will waste a lot of time.

I haven't decided yet if I'm going to try and brave the crowds this year or just sleep in. I'll let you know what I ended up doing and if I end up getting any deals!