So this is the first Black Friday I've written about where "Friday" is kind of a lie. I'm typing this at my kitchen table a little after midnight, still wired on gas station coffee, and technically it's Friday now, but the whole thing started while the turkey carcass was still sitting out on the counter last night.
Target opened at 9pm Thursday. Best Buy did 8pm. Walmart, from what I saw on Twitter, had people already lined up outside by mid-afternoon for an 8pm door time. My sister-in-law works retail and she had to leave dessert early to go clock in, and I'm not going to pretend that didn't bug me a little. I get that stores compete on this stuff and somebody's going to blink first if their competitor opens earlier, but there's something a little grim about racing your neighbor to the mall before you've even done the dishes. A few years ago this was a sunrise thing. Now it's a Thanksgiving-evening thing, and I don't love the direction that's heading.
That said. I still went. I'm not made of stone and there was a 40 inch LCD TV for $179 with my name on it, so around 7:45 I left my in-laws' place under the flimsy excuse of "needing air" and drove to Best Buy, where the line already wrapped around the side of the building into the parking lot of the Chili's next door. Got in around 9:15, out by 9:40, TV in the trunk, and honestly the employees running the doorbuster line were better organized than I expected, handing out tickets for the big-ticket items so nobody had to full-sprint through the store like it's the Oklahoma land rush.
One thing that made this particular Black Friday weirder than most: the Wii U. It launched five days ago, on the 18th, and it was already scarce before tonight even started. My cousin tried three different stores back on launch weekend and struck out every time. Nintendo apparently didn't print enough units to cover the demand, which is a strange problem to have with a brand new console but here we are. So all the "doorbuster" ads for it this week were basically decoys: a handful of bundles per store, gone in the first ten minutes, mostly to people who'd been camped out since dinner. I didn't even bother chasing it. If you actually walked out of a store tonight with one, respect, genuinely.
And it's not just brick and mortar chaos this month either. Remember two weeks ago when the Nexus 4 went up on the Play Store and sold out in under an hour? Same energy, different venue. Everybody scrambling for something that isn't priced like it should be that popular: the Nexus 4 starts at $299 unlocked, no contract, which for the hardware you're getting is genuinely a good deal and apparently good enough that Google's own servers couldn't keep up with checkout. I keep hearing that as sort of a punchline this year: great deal, physically impossible to obtain.
Anyway. I'm sitting here now with a TV I don't have wall space for yet, a stomach full of leftover stuffing I ate standing over the sink at 11pm, and mixed feelings about the whole enterprise. Part of me thinks the Thursday-night creep is a bad trade — trading a day off for a few hours of head start on savings that'll mostly still be there tomorrow morning anyway. Part of me is a hypocrite who was standing in that Chili's parking lot at quarter to eight. Both things are true at once, apparently, and I don't think I'm the only one who left the table early tonight feeling a little weird about it.
Cyber Monday's in four days if the in-store stuff isn't your scene. I might actually prefer it — nobody elbows you for a keyboard shortcut.