Black Friday Sale

It was a tempting offer. Though the configuration was not what I desired the $300 price tag impressed upon me. I had decided to checkout Circuit City on the day after thanksgiving to checkout their laptop sale. As a good planner I enquired with my colleagues on their experiences with the Black Friday sale and deduced 11:00 pm to be the time that I had to reach the store. Yes my dear people who have had no experience of this sale, you have to queue up outside the shops well before midnight to get a shot at the awesome deals. None of my friends were willing to come to Circuit City as most their desired items were on sale in Best Buy. Staying outside a shop in the Minnesota weather for 6 hours in the night is no mean effort. I needed company! So I changed the plan from CC to BB.
The mercury scale read 18F (-7C) and so padding started. I had a jacket over a sweater over a sweat shirt over a t-shirt over a thermal. We reached BB at 11:30 pm and it was quite a sight. I felt like the most under-prepared person over there. Whoa! People were there with tents, fire, comforters, chairs and what not. The line extended to the side of BB and I lost most of the hope of getting the door buster deals. Still, we decided to stand in the line to experience the adventure. Few minutes in the line made us recognize that we were the only guys "standing" there. So we sent one of us back to get a comforter or a blanket on which we could sit. By the time the guy came back, the people behind us were joining the queue in their cars itself. Not a bad idea when the other option was to risk being held as part of the sale in the form of a frozen statue. When our friend retuned, we made him park the car in the queue and entered the comfort of it. We gave the chairs he got to the others outside and also had couple of them share the car space with us. One of them remarked “This feels like the pent house”. The other said, “From now on I am going to empathize more for the homeless”. Such was the cold outside. The temperature should have gone down by atleast couple of more degrees. I was thankful to God on the day after Thanksgiving.
At 3 am the shore keepers came out distributing coupons for the store buster deals. It was time to abandon the coziness of the car and enter the bitter world of bad weather again. Within few minutes I felt numbness in my feet that turned to pain even sooner. It didn’t take an Edison to deduce that people around were not dancing, but moving their legs just to keep them going.
Though there were about 60-80 people before us, we managed to get some sleek deals’ coupons. I got the Sony Vaio NR110E for $400. It is listed in Amazon for $800!

Success at the end of perseverance does taste sweet. After my friends picked up the things that they wished for, we stood in the serpentine line for about 20 mins just to pay for the items and get out of the shop. This is one heck of an experience that none of us is going to forget in a long time.