Days 42/43

I'm upset. Yesterday I wrote a long post describing my experiences on Black Friday. Somehow it didn't get posted. I'll recreate it in this entry.

I got up at 4 AM to travel 20 miles to a store named HEB Plus. This store is sort of like a Super Target except it comes from the opposite direction. HEB Plus is a grocery store that added variety merchandise. Super Target is a variety store that added groceries. The quest was for an 8 GB iPod for $99. That's $50 less than the fair trade price that Apple forces their retailers to adhere to. The store had many Black Friday deals including some really low prices on TV's, video games, and big ticket toys.

The store opened at 5 AM. I got there about 4:45. There were at least 1,000 people in line. I'm not exaggerating. The line was set up in a serpentine fashion, like many amusement parks. That made it easy to estimate the length by counting 100 people, observing how much space they took, and then applying it to the rest of the line. In the 20 minutes or so that it took me to get into the store, several hundred more people showed up. A store employee told me that there were 100 people in line at 1 AM. The temperature that night got down to 38 degrees.

I knew as soon as I got to the store that there was no way that I was going to get an iPod. I decided to stay and watch the show. I didn't see any stampede. Then again, I couldn't see the first people in line entering the building. The store is big, probably at least 75,000 square feet. What surprised me was that it didn't seem crowded even though there were probably 1,500 people in the store.

I decided to do a little grocery shopping. The store did a good job at the checkout stations. Even with the Black Friday rush I didn't have to wait long.

I left the store about a little before 6 AM. The question was what to do with the rest of the day. I stopped at Home Depot to buy sandpaper for one of my projects and then went home. I was there by 6:30, an hour and a half before I usually get up. My life has changed from the many years when I got up at 6:15 every morning.

Having accomplished all that I set out to do before I usually get out of bed I faced a choice. I could do something useful, or I could read and watch TV. It was relatively cold outside (low 50's), so I decided to read and watch football games. I actually didn't watch the games. I cared less about the teams that were playing. Instead I surfed the web while the TV was on.

As a consolation prize for not getting the iPod, I ordered a couple of $3.99 DVD's from a website that was having a Black Friday sale. That's a much more civilized way of doing things. Unfortunately I also tried to order a present for one of our friends. That site had sold out of the item that I wanted to buy.



Today (Day 43) started out with a pancake breakfast put on by the park every other week. I try to attend whenever possible. The rest of the day was a routine maintenance day. I cleaned the trailer, watered the plants, and drained the tanks. I also completed one of my projects and did a little more work on the other.

I decided not to leave the park. My experience yesterday caused me to just want to sit around. Besides, it was sunny and warm today. Why spend the day in stores?