The day after Thanksgiving is the kickoff of the holiday shopping season, but that doesn't mean it's the best time of year to shop. I read last year that statistically speaking, the weekend before Christmas offers the best all around deals. I know that it’s hard to ignore the hullaballoo that surrounds Black Friday, but is it really worth the effort?
If you’re in the market for a plasma TV or a laptop computer, you can find some great deals by heading to the stores before dawn, but does the average consumer really have these big ticket items on their lists? I, for one, don’t. So this year I scanned the deals in the papers, but did most of my shopping online. Here’s what I found.
I got the same deal plus free shipping by doing my shopping on the web. In fact, I went out for a couple of hours on Friday to see what the fuss was about, but instead of getting the deal of the century, I only got a headache. I found that most stores only allow a small handful of people actual get the door buster prices. So even if you were in line at 5 a.m., you still may leave empty handed. At Joe’s Sporting goods for example, they had a GPS unit that was $150 dollars off. But if you weren’t one of eight people with the magic ticket, you had to keep shopping. Oddly enough, that was the only GPS unit on sale in the store. So all of those people who didn’t score the big deal ended up buying full price gear purely because they were amidst the shopping frenzy. I, however, went home and bought a unit online that was $60 cheaper than it was in the store.
At Toys R Us I found that a lot of toys were on sale, but none of the ones I was looking for. Best Buy offered a handful of deals, but nothing I couldn’t get online. And Target had just as many deals on Saturday as they did on Friday. All of this added up for a whole lot of wasted hype for me.
It's funny how excited people get at the idea of spending money when in fact there is a really good chance they are paying full price for most of their items. Of course, maybe I just need to be added more big ticket items to my shopping list.
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