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Maybe you’re one of those people who sat outside Wal-Mart all night waiting for the Xbox360 to come off the shelves. Or perhaps your one of those who camped outside Best Buy for the chance to buy one of their laptops at the Christmas discount. If so, don’t read this article.
The Christmas chaos arrived with a vengeance after Thanksgiving. It wasn’t enough to get ready by camping out – many people visited “Black Friday 2005” (http://bf2005.com/) to prepare for the event. (Retailers named the Friday following Thanksgiving as Black Friday to indicate that their finances would go in the black after being in the red all year.) Others pilfered their neighbor’s newspapers to get the advertisements – OK, this probably didn’t happen since so few people actually read newspapers anymore, but I like to think it did.
It’s not like America even got a legitimate Thanksgiving season. Wal Mart and many grocery stores filled aisles with Christmas paraphernalia before anyone cooked a turkey. By the time my god-daughters reach puberty, I expect at least one (if not two) Wal Mart aisles will be dedicated to Christmas year-around. Perhaps they’ll put a golden ticket into the packaging so that you’ll win a Christmas shopping spree in the wee hours prior to Black Friday. Imagine – lines of people circle the building with some watching through the windows in awe because you get to handpick through the sales with nobody looking over your shoulder and no chance of getting trampled as you walk out the door! We can only dream.
I’m not the kind of guy to fight a crowd now for something I can get on the cheap later. Instead of getting crunched at Christmas, I recommend getting things easy on the eye, ear, throat and pocketbook. Continue reading