I’ve already written and posted this post, but something happened this morning so here’s try 2.  :)

Today’s topic is one that I’m looking forward to – not necessarily this post, but the actual action:

Do you shop on Black Friday? What time do you start? Do you finish all your shopping on that day? What’s the best deal you have found? What’s your shopping strategy?

I LOVE Black Friday shopping.  I’ve been all over the web (there are several Black Friday sites) finding all the sites I can about what will be on sale where and actually have most of my plans for next Friday mapped out already.

Shopping on the day after Thanksgiving is a tradition for our family.  My grandmother, my mother and I all go and do some major bargain shopping.  The plans begin early.  Like I mentioned, I’ve already gathered most of the ads and forwarded them no to my mom and grandmother.  We’ve got our lists ready.  We compare items we know we want at each store to know who has the best deal.

Next Thursday (Thanksgiving) we will go back through the acutal sale papers to make sure that the sales I’m finding on the Black Friday websites are true and develop a final plan.  We will split up the stores so that we can be at all of them when they open. For whatever stores I’m going to, I’ll have my list, my mom’s, and my grandmother’s.  Sometimes Dad puts some items on the list, but he won’t dare brave the crowds.

Friday morning we’ll wake up WAY TOO early and head over to the neighboring town that actually has stores to shop at.  We’ll travel in a caravan so that we can go too different stores and have plenty of room for all of our purchases.  We’ll use our cell phones and each hit a different area of town and buy as many items on each of our lists as possible.

Around 9:30 or 10:00 we tend to have wrapped up our early bird shopping, and we all meet at Ihop for a late breakfast to share what we did successfully buy and what we missed.  Then sometimes we will go browse the mall or stores that have sales that day, but not early morning be there at store opening sales and then head home to divide up our purchases and take them to our respective homes to wrap them.