The Black Friday Flip

I didn't grow up in a family that was crazy about shopping. We were more interested in going to the store to get what we needed and then getting on with other things. Last year, my roommate dragged me out of bed for my first Black Friday sale. He'd been scouring the Black Friday ad sites for weeks and had a list of items he wanted to try and get come the Friday after Thanksgiving. He did a final check of ads on Thursday before heading off to his girlfriend's house for dinner.

 We finalized our plans late that night. We'd get up at 4 am, and head to a computer store that was 45 minutes away. Sure we'd be passing lots of sales on the way, but the trick is balancing the expected crowd with the likelyhood of the items you want. 

We were bundled up in our winter clothes and in line by 5. We'd picked our location well. While there were folks in line much earlier than us, we were only half a block away and the store was limiting folks to only one of the specials. In other words, since we had three possible items, it was likely we'd get one of them.

In fact, when the employees came down the line with the vouchers,  we both got what we wanted. He wanted one size of TV that ran out two or three people behind him. I was shopping for what I really wanted and there were several of my size tv left.

Vouchers in hand, we got back into the truck, broke out our breakfast pumpkin pie slices and headed to a second store for HD DVD players. Like at the first store, the TVs and game systems were the big sellers, so there were many DVD players still in stock. Then we went across the street to pick up memory cards and any DVDs that looked interesting. When we were done there, we headed back to the first store, got our tvs and got into line. An hour later we checked out.

We picked up lunch on the way home and by the time we were there a quick check of Craigslist and eBay showed the going price for what we'd just bought no less than $150 over what we'd paid. Pretty good for a few hours of work.

I didn't sell my tv. But I've had a lot of fun knowing I could have.