First — Black Friday.
Did you go out? Did you get any deals? I certainly didn’t go out, though I hear things are getting massively out of hand. My mother was checking the sales on Thanksgiving and found that JCPenney was opening at 4 AM on Friday. For the love of kami-sama, that is too frakking early!!! Also, according to the news, people were lined up as early as 11pm on Thursday. What could be so amazing of a deal that necessitates you spending 5+ hours outside of a store? Of course, every year the stores open earlier (along with closing later), soon stores will be opening up at Midnight. I wonder if people will start lining up at noon then? Sigh…
Now I did manage to get a few good deals, even though I didn’t go out. One of the best deals I got was actually Thursday, and that was Stargate Atlantis, the complete series for $89. It doesn’t beat when I found Babylon 5 the complete series for $15 a season ($75 total) at Costco randomly, but it does come close. I must say, shopping digitally is much less aggravating than going to the stores. I know that there were some stores selling 46″ flat screens for crazy low prices like $250, but those are extremely limited quantity (like 5) and require you sitting out side a store for 6 hours. No thanks, I simply don’t have the drive or the need. Those ultra low price deals are mainly to get people in the door.
Of course, that leads to “Cyber Monday” which, let’s be honest, is a load of crap. I watched a news report a while back that showed the top online sales days for the last few years, guess what? None of them were “Cyber Monday”. Granted, we’re just getting into Cyber Monday now, as I write this, but I think Black Friday had a large number of deals online. I know both Dell and Apple had some fairly good stuff going on, though nothing terribly spectacular. It did seem that most digital outlets had some form of sale online, on Black Friday.
While Black Friday & Cyber Monday are “popular” sale days, it seems that we’re progressing beyond just a single day sales. I read that WalMart is running some of their deals all week. Amazon.com is having an entire week of sales (both Black Friday Week and Cyber Monday Week), with daily & hourly specials (which they normally do in the form of the Gold Box, but these are even better discounts and a much larger number of deals). Steam has been running their “Early Holiday” sale which is 5 days worth of 1 day game sales, and they are super good deals if you are interested in playing the games. NewEgg also put up their Black Friday and now Cyber Monday sales and have left them up, until the individual units are sold out.
Good deals, good deals.