Black Friday

I've never shopped on Black Friday, with good reason, right? This year my friend Kelsy talked me into it, so Thanksgiving night I gathered all the ads and made my plan of attack. We met at Wal-Mart at 4:30 a.m. and clutching our freezing shopping carts and huge Starbucks, entered the store along with hundreds of others to position ourselves closest to our most desired item. For me, it was a pink ride-on Jeep for Peanut, which was stacked at the very far corner of the store, with too many people already lined up waiting for the clock to strike 5 a.m.

Now mind you, I'm using the term "lined-up" very losely, as there was a posse of 5 already formed there, so never you mind the rest of us who ridiculously wished of getting our hands on a Jeep. And the posse wasn't ashamed of giving the run down of which box was going to whom and how long they've been standing there and there is obviously too few boxes and too many people.

This is when I began to get a little shaky. I blame the coffee. Secretly I thought this would actually become ugly. Over a Jeep. A toy. At Christmas. Seriously? And so I just stood there "in line" chatting with another mom dreaming of getting 2 Jeeps, while we stared nervously at the posse and the clock.



At 4:45 the Wal-Mart bouncers arrived, cut the black plastic covering all the pallets of loss-leaders in the entire store, and positioned themselves for the rioting. At 5 a.m. the Jeeps (and EVERYTHING else in the entire store) were grabbed and loaded into carts in less than 60 seconds. I'm happy to report Peanut will be getting one for Christmas! (Ok with help from a friend who happened to be standing there also and could see that I was about to get trampled and have my box stolen.)