Black Friday is the devil

We all have such an overwhelming desire to save money and to find any way to "beat the man", that the companies have no choice but to cater to our foolish wants and exploit them to the fullest extent possible. Black Friday is the result. Everybody opens at 5:00 AM, and offers a small quantity of some amazing deal guaranteed to let us all justify standing in a ridiculously long line for a chance at getting the score of the year. Likewise, these companies know that after the first 5 people claim their prize, that the other 995 idiots who have been in line since yesterday's sunset, in their sleep deprived, caffinated state will cough up full price for a similar product so that they don't get that empty feeling of having just wasted some of their life.

I was one of those idiots on Friday. For the same selfish reasons as everybody else, my father and I decided to get up at 3:45 AM in order to get to Best Buy before their 5:00 AM opening in hopes of scoring a $600 Lap Top computer for $250. I don't even really need one, but the thought of such a sweet deal was just too powerful. We arrived early... around 4:40. What we saw was a line that started at the Best Buy doors, and wrapped all the way around to the main mall entrance approximately 200 yards away. This line was also apprxomately 5 people wide. I would guess that there were easily 1,000 people who were already in line at 4:45 AM. Realizing that there was no possible way that two of the "minimum 10 per store" would still be available after over 1,000 people pushed, shoved, ran, and stomped their way into the store, we left with our tails between our legs.

On the way home, we swung through the K-Mart plaza in North Adams to scope out the state of the new Staples that was opening up at 6:00 AM. Since there were only a handful of customers waiting in front, we pulled in and decided to try and redeem our efforts and not go home empty handed. After a brief 15 minute wait, I walked into the store, picked up a 20" Samsung widescreen computer monitor and forked over the $259.95, irritated that the "$179.95" advertised price was only after sending in a mail-in rebate.

So now I have a snazzy new widescreen monitor that I didn't really need, running at a less than optimal resolution thanks to my low budget video card that worked just fine with my old monitor. For all this, I get to live with the knowledge that I, like all of the mindless twits that I so often criticize, got my sleep deprived ass out of bed in the middle of the night to save a few bucks on a piece of equipment that I never needed in the first place.

And after all that, I'm posting my blog from work because my shitty 29.2 dial up connection infuriates me every time I dial in.