Black Friday

This year, retailers decided to do something different. Instead of opening at 5/6 am, most stores opened at midnight. I'm not a fan of this, for several reasons.

It's bad for store employees because they are required to work from Thursday evening through Friday morning. Example being Gamestop, which required employees to work from 10pm Thursday to 10am Friday. 12 hour shift, all night and morning. Not only does it kill their Friday, it kills their Thursday as well, and so Thanksgiving.

It's bad for consumers as well though, because of the increased number of them. More people are going to go to a store at midnight than at 5am in the morning. That means that A, stores won't be able to offer deals as good, and B, it's harder to grab the deals that are offered. Example, Best Buy this year sold a 42" HDTV for 200 dollars. Each store only had 10 though, and when I called the local store on Wednesday evening, I was told that there were already customers lined up outside. That's over 24 hours ahead of time for those of you who don't like math.

I ended up not going at all, because everything I was interested in was selling at midnight instead of 5am. What I'm looking at now are the Cyber Monday sales coming in in a few days.