Thanksgiving and Black Friday

For those in the UK, yesterday was Thanksgiving. A day when almost everyone drives hours to see family, so they can eat copious amounts of food, and drive back fairly quickly to get ready for xmas shopping.

We went up to Maryland to see Kim's parents, at a restaurant about 1/2 way between both of our houses. So we had a 2 hour drive, followed by a 90 minute meal, followed by the same 2 hour drive in reverse (well we went forward, but you know what I mean) ;)

Today is a day known as 'Black Friday'. Following on from Wednesday 'The busiest travel day of the year', we have 'The busiest shopping day of the year'. Every store tries to pull people in buy doing things such as opening at 5am, offering limited edition specials (new laptops for $100, 1 per store, etc). The newspaper that came today was filled to the brim with special offers, mostly from 6am to 11am, 5am to noon, next 2 days, etc, etc. The UK equivalent of this would be the January sales (for the Americans, that's the post xmas sales that tend to occur in the new year to get rid of the crap that didn't sell before xmas). I don't really like the idea of the crowds, people pushing each other out of the way to get a chicken dance elmo for $5 cheaper than the day before, etc, etc. So I've never been tempted to fall for Black Friday.

Until today...

My mission is to hit Walmart at 5am, and hopefully pick up a 2GB SD drive for $30 ($70 savings) for my Palm T|X. Following that I'll be headed to Target for their 6am opening and a $13 Easy Bake Oven ($9 savings), and possibly some luggage for $60 ($40 saving) and a new 16" Barbie bicycle $48 ($12 savings), then over to either Staples or Circuit City for the 2GB SD drive should Walmart have not had enough in stock.

Wish me luck...

(oh, and with the stores opening in 4 hours, I don't think I'm going to get to bed tonight, so this should be lots of fun) ;)