So Thanksgiving night happened, and by "Thanksgiving night" I mean the point where Black Friday just... isn't Friday anymore. I said I wasn't going to do this again after last year. I did it again.
Walmart pushed their doorbusters to 10pm Thursday this year, and Target followed at midnight, and Best Buy stuck with their usual midnight-ish opening too, so instead of one big chaotic morning you got this weird staggered thing where people were literally leaving Thanksgiving dinner to go sit in a parking lot. My cousin's family eats at 2pm specifically so everyone can be in line by 7. That's not a holiday tradition, that's a logistics problem.
I got to the Best Buy on Route 9 around 9:45pm and there were already probably 200 people camped out with folding chairs, and one guy had an honest-to-god pop-up tent, like he was at a campsite and not in a strip mall parking lot next to a Chili's. It was cold. Not brutally cold, but cold enough that I regretted every decision that led me there. The line snaked around the whole building twice.
The big draw for a lot of people this year, at least from what I overheard in line, wasn't even really a doorbuster item, it was people hoping to grab a Kindle Fire. It came out on the 15th at $199 and Amazon apparently can't make enough of them, so the idea that Best Buy might have a stack of them for the same $199 with no shipping wait got people worked up. I didn't end up going for one. I've been playing with a coworker's for like a week now and honestly the thing feels sluggish, the touch response lags just enough to be annoying, and there's no volume buttons on it which is a genuinely baffling design choice. Nice screen for the price though, I'll give it that.
The doorbuster I actually stood in line for was a 46" TV for $298, which honestly is a good deal, but it turns out "good deal" times "200 people" equals "gone in about four minutes." I did not get the TV. I got a $19.99 Blu-ray player instead as a consolation prize, which, fine, whatever, my old DVD player was on its last legs anyway.
The genuinely upsetting story from this whole weekend, and I feel bad even mentioning it next to my TV whining, is the pepper spray thing at the Walmart out in Porter Ranch, California. A woman apparently used pepper spray on other shoppers to get to an Xbox display first, and like 20 people ended up needing medical attention. That's not "chaotic Black Friday energy," that's just an assault, and it's a pretty grim data point for what doorbuster culture has turned into. Nobody in my line was pepper-spraying anybody, to be clear, it was mostly just tired people making small talk about the cold, but stories like that make the whole ritual feel a little more insane than usual.
Was it worth it? For the Blu-ray player, sure, nineteen bucks is nineteen bucks. For the four hours of standing outside in November so I could watch a TV I wanted get carried out by somebody else? Not really. I think next year I'm doing the online thing instead and just accepting I won't get the doorbuster-tier prices. Amazon and a bunch of other sites had "Cyber Monday" pricing creeping earlier and earlier this year too, some of it was live over the weekend already, so the whole line-camping ritual is starting to feel a little pointless when the same discount shows up on your laptop three days later minus the frostbite.
One more small complaint since I'm already complaining: whoever decided the checkout line should also be the same length as the doorbuster line needs to rethink some things. I stood in that store for two hours total and maybe six minutes of it was actual shopping.
Anyway. My feet hurt, I have a Blu-ray player I didn't need, and I'm never setting an alarm for 9:15pm again. We'll see how long that lasts.