Thanksgiving a day to strategize for shopping

By the time you read this Thanksgiving will be but a bloated memory (or is that a memory of bloating) and Black Friday will be in the books.
At the time of this writing, however, the leftover turkey is still warm in the fridge and the newspaper ads used to map a Black Friday strategy are still spread across the dining room table. The morning will come extra early as we seek to join a few million of our closest fellow insomniac shoppers to take advantage of early bird doorbuster specials.
Actually, my wife, Sandy, will be busting down the doors for early-hour specials. I will be at the stores interviewing other early birds to talk about the great deals they’re getting. And while I’m there I may pick up a thing or two. That’s one of the perks/curses of being a journalist.
I used to be a morning person. That changed sometime between college and parenthood. Now I really have to drag myself to get out the door before oh-dark-thirty. Of course getting to that point requires a lot of work.
For the past three years we have been blessed to have my parents come down from Colorado to spend Thanksgiving with us. They’re really good about watching the kids while we go shopping. By “watching” I mean being physically present in the same house, because I doubt too many eyes are open.
This year I was the one to get up early with the bird on Thanksgiving. Throughout the day as we cooked, cleaned, ate some more and sat around, we kept pulling out the ads and mulling over the specials. They’re not real great this year, at least not for our family.
Still, there are a few items that we would like to get.
Now, I have to take this little detour to tell you that as we were eating our feast, Colton, my 5-year-old, piped up and said “this is my favorite kind of chicken!”
Anyway, I have been shopping and/or reporting on Black Friday for about 15 years. The first time I did it I was in North Carolina. I went to Wal-Mart because I wanted a really cheap VCR. They let me in the store ahead of the crowd so I could get pictures of the mob coming in. By the time I took a couple pictures and paused to write down some names, the VCRs had vanished. About a hundred of us complained, so they took rainchecks and sold them to us the next day after a new shipment arrived.
There was a time about seven or eight years ago in Colorado where I got out of bed at 4:45 a.m., pulled on clothes and drove to Wal-Mart where I got in line. I bagged my items and was back home in bed by 5:35. In less than an hour I had done almost all of my Christmas shopping. I usually reserve that kind of efficiency for the evening of Dec. 24.
In fact – and this is a true story – I bought the last Tickle Me Elmo in town on Dec. 24 at 9 p.m. I know it was the last one in town because I started at 7 p.m. and hit every single store that sold toys until I found it. That was the year it was the “must have” toy.
Now things are different. There aren’t any “must haves” for Black Friday. There are some really good deals, but nothing that we can’t live without. Maybe we’ve finally learned to be thankful for what we have. More than anything I’m just happy to have a day with my family and my parents. I know there will come a time when these youngsters are grown and gone with families of their own. And when that happens, Sandy I and will be the ones crashed on the couch while they’re out busting down doors in the wee hours of Black Friday. And by the way, I’m convinced they call it Black Friday because most of the shopping is done while it’s still black outside.
I will be making a stab at a thing or two this year, but for the most part I will stick to my tradition of doing most of my shopping the evening of the 24th. That’s when the stores are really ready to make a deal. And it may be black out then, but it won’t be early in the morning.
P.S. If you ever want to make God laugh, tell him your plans. It is now Friday morning and Sandy got called in early to work and missed out on about half of her shopping spree. I made it to Wal-Mart and conducted interviews and took pictures.
And in a mode of deja vu, the one item I wanted was sold out! I cam back to the office and looked online – and it was sold out there as well.