SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

Fiancé and I had a nice peaceful Thanksgiving with a nice low-key meal at home and a hike afterwards.

So we figured maybe we would mix it up a bit and do something to shake things up a bit tomorrow like go to the mall for no good reason haha

What about the rest of you? Black Friday shopping or no Black Friday shopping?

Regretfully I went to one of our local malls this morning at 7 a,m. when they opened.

I just needed one item for my DIL, the store didn't have it.

So I checked a couple of other stores, no luck, and began my exit about 7:40.

The crowds had probably quadrupled+ since I arrived, and I couldn't wait to get back into the fresh air.

I think the last time I was at our local mall was about two years ago purchasing candles on Black Friday, again at opening.

[This message edited by annb at 12:15 AM, Saturday, November 30th]

Oh wow annb

Wish you had had a bit better fortune with your Black Friday Shopping.

We ventured out with oddly no plans to buy anything. We did have a couple errands so figured we would start and see what happened.

We mailed some packages and cards at the mostly empty post office and dropped a package off at the completely empty FedX store.

Then we checked out getting wired internet from the new internet provider (what we have had available at the little downtown apartment is cellular which we is what we got and the alternative had been the slowest cable internet I have seen in 20 years). Another month or so and we might have internet on par with the first decade of this century.

We decided to get a hot tea using our monthly beverage subscription…really no one at the chain bakery either…

So we figured why not up the ante and see what happens. Fiancé remembered he had been meaning to order a sweatshirt in person at the huge chain sporting goods store so we did that. He wanted one with the logo of the college he is attending and the website has been cancelling his orders… After a long wait in line where I shopped holiday socks and about half the store while he waited to place the order, he got the sweatshirt ordered. Hopefully this order actually gets to him without being cancelled.

Then we figured why not pick up the pace somewhat. We proceeded to go to at least 5 stores including 2 big box stores to try to buy an ice scaper for his truck. It was snowing very lightly and was maybe 30 degrees, which in the south causes everyone to point at the flakes, experience mass panic, and buy up all of the ice scrapers. Fiancé and I both grew up in the North, so could have improvised indefinitely for about anything we would ever see here using an old credit card

But I humored him and helped him hunt through stores, hoping to find an ice scraper the hoard had missed. We finally found one in the very back of a huge farm store and for just $3.99 we can brush the 4 flakes of snow off the windshield.

Of course we also had to make sure to buy milk and eggs not because we were afraid of the snow, but because we are having scrambled eggs for breakfast and he had been baking. And that’s when we entered the true chaos

we got all the way through the long long checkout line (as if people had not just 2 days ago loaded up on cart loads of food, but it could snow )

We got out of the store alive, gave some nice couple shopping with their baby our coveted cart (carts were pretty much all gone and it was too cold for them to have to fumble to find their quarter and struggle to get the cart unlocked…if you know what store we are talking about I bet you are smiling reading this….)

Then we had the bad judgement to go into a big discount store to see if the restocked of all things..the travel size tweezers. They had, and I got the coveted Minnie Mouse mini version along with a small deodorant. Now the truth is we are not going anywhere that I know of for weeks. But that didn’t stop us from thinking this was a good day to cross these little items off our to do list. We had to park at least a half mile away from the entrance, must have dodged at least 100 shoppers pawing their way through holiday pjs, and we waited in line for at least a half hour to pay. But we did it!

We shopped Black Friday!!!

Hope everyone has a peaceful and happy holiday weekend!!

[This message edited by Shehawk at 11:00 PM, Saturday, November 30th]

Was today sort of another Normalcy Test, LOL? 🙂

That quarter for the shopping cart got a chuckle out of me. Only one place in the Valley up here that you could have been referring to. They have such nice prices on gourmet food stuff.

Hope your Thanksgiving Day was wonderful too.

I've done Black Friday before, and it can be lots of fun. Didn't do Black Friday this year, but I am going to go to Small Business Saturday. Our downtown association and several of the businesses have special events going on. One is a map that you can get stamped. Five stamps & 1 receipt and you're put in a drawing for some tote bags with prizes. This year, they have a lot more businesses involved. They even got a sponsor for a "little hopper" bus so you can hop on/hop off and not have to drive or walk.

We did our Black Friday shopping on the Walmart app. Picked everything up curbside. Crowds are a no go for me.

The one year that I lived in the US, I had a little list of things I wanted to go get that were on special. My mom was visiting at the time, so the two of us went out into the chaos. We couldn't get close to Target. We got extremely lucky and got a close parking spot at Kohl's. I had been to that Kohl's a couple of times before, and checking out of that one was extremely slow and tedious on a good day. I honestly don't know why it was so slow. On black Friday, the line-ups to check out extended through the entire store down both main aisles to the very back of the store. I would see people in line with a couple of towels or something and I'd think really, you're that vested in these towels that you are literally going to wait for hours to check out? No, thank you!

The only place that I ended up buying anything was Walgreens who at the time had some kind of deal on vitamins and supplements, like buy two, get one free, so I stocked up on the things I used for my dogs (vitamin C, E, fish oil, curcumin, milk thistle, etc) and I was pretty happy with that haul.

If I lived there again, I would not do black Friday shopping again with no regrets!

I bought a new ereader in September, knowing that it had never been discounted during the Christmas season before; it wasn't discounted this year, either.

We're visiting our son and GS, and I complained about my son's internet performance. Since I'm an ex-MCSE, he wanted me to be around to set up any new router. On Tuesday we found one at a good discount that meets my pretty high requirements; one vendor promised to deliver Wednesday, so we bought it. My wifi 5 download speed went from 45 mbps to 300 mbps. Our GS's online chess sites failed regularly on the old router but have stayed up on the new one.

My dad was a retailer, and I worked for a major retailer for 3 years. I was in IT, but we had to do 2 hours service during the Christmas season on the floor directing customers who asked for directions. I made my 1st sale when I was 7 during this season. I sold cameras during on Christmas when I was in grad school; that was a BLAST! This is a very exciting period for me.

I've got an easy route to THE Macy's (34th street). I love the Christmas season, but only as a seller. There's no way I'd try to get through the crowds to buy - online purchases only.