Black Friday Countdown, Part Three

My friend and his son made it through another night with temps well below freezing.  But they are seeing more action in the line today.  

11/27/13
 4:00am  We decided to make a run for the toilets at WalMart. Since WalMart is so close to BB, our total trip time was 15 minutes.   Well, I'll admit it. This year's black Friday shopping was totally different than normal. Maybe it is the economy or most likely the cold weather, nobody is camped out at stores like usual. Even WalMart had no people. I should caveat that this only seems to hold true for southern Indiana. By all accounts from the workers inside BB, the stores in Louisville have tons of people waiting and camping. Over here? Well, its just me and my son. It turns out that our 36 hour camp so far could have been shortened by at least 36 hours.  Now, there still may end up being a lot of people come. It may reach a point where the line to get in wraps around the building. But that time is not now. Not at 4:24 in the morning anyway. Maybe it will in another hour or so.

9:30am   Our friend from work finally showed up. The son and I made room in our tent and now we have 3 people. At 10:00 am more people started showing up. Now only 6 hours left until vouchers are handed out.

10:50 am  Our line has finally grown. By 10:45am, we have two ladies sitting in lawn chairs and a huge tent with a mother and her 20-something-year-old son.  Since the line is what it is, my work friend and my son decided to go to the gas station.

 

3:30 pm  The store opens in 2.5 hours. More people are in line now. Still, it is way lower than normal. Some friends of mine spotted me in line and stopped to say hi. Unfortunately, when the husband asked if he could sit in our tent, I of course had to tell him where the end of the line is. He's ok. There still aren't that many people in line yet.

4:00 pm  The local media is here at 4pm. The interviewed the person in line behind us. BB workers are showing up now too.

 

 4:11pm. The line is longer now.  The Best Buy workers told us the tickets/vouchers will start being handed out at 5pm.

5:45 pm  Editor's Update -- I did a drive-by at the WalMart a mile from The Compound just to gawk, and the parking lot was full.  I don't know where anyone else will park.  I'm glad I got out of there and safely made it home. 

6:20pm. Finally we are finished. Total we bought a very nice Dell desktop computer a with 24" LED monitor plus a copy of Microsoft office, a Kindle Fire (for a friend), Sony smart blue ray player and an iPod Nano. I wanted to buy a nice touch screen laptop, but my wife said no. It would have put us over $1,000 and too much money. The desktop didn't come without drama. That was the big ticket item I was waiting for. Unfortunately, they didn't hand out vouchers for that item. That meant I needed to get to that item before other people. Since we were first in line, we shouldn't have had a problem. But, all of our items were scattered across the store. Fortunately, we got to the computers in time. They only had five of this computer/monitor bundle in stock.