November 29, 2003

On the Friday after Thanksgiving, I accompanied Linda on her early morning mission at Best Buy since Albert can't hang in with the shopping stuff.  Then later in the morning we eventually made it to Gilroy.   He thought we were insane for getting out so early to shop and he was right.  But we did appreciate the coffee he prepared with the timer on the coffee machine.

All day Friday was 30% off at Hugo Boss.  I knew I shouldn't start shopping for myself first but I only recently found out they have a Boss outlet at Gilroy.  Wahoo.   Aside from being a long day, it was productive.  I picked up some cheap stocking stuffers at one of those paper stores with nice notepads and blank cards for personal use.  Cheapie toys for some kids including random items for stocking stuffers at the toy store outlet.  There was a clothing store named Vanity Fair which seemed to have a lot of discounted clothing items so I managed to pick up a few things for gifts.  Also available was a bookstore with some decent prices on recent hardcovers.  Most of my shopping would seem to be done with a few loose items to be picked up on the fly in coming days.   I believe I can take it easy for the remainder of the shopping season.

Oh and lots of people watching for amusement all day long.  That is after all the main purpose of being out the day after Thanksgiving as the behavior of shoppers looking for a discount can be quite a sight.   Waiting outside the Best Buy at 3:30am was definitely a unique experience.  I'm not really sure what is the best way to explain the ATM guy and some of the other losers....I mean characters in line.  Maybe you can get Linda to tell you.   I do know we were better off at Best Buy than Linda's friend at Wal-Mart.  We did see a few people running into Best Buy knocking things over with a shopping cart, but over at Wal-Mart Linda's friend reported that her friend was knocked down by a shopping cart during the insanity.  I thought it was suppose to be the prices falling down, not the customers.  Wal-Mart definitely attracts a different demographic.

I found it interesting that day on how the outlet attracted brand loyalty.   The Gap Outlet was insanely crowded with wall-to-wall foot traffic and what looked like a 20 minute wait in line.  Meanwhile the J. Crew Outlet looked to have a near empty store with about 20 people at most and a short line at the register.   Not a good sign for the Crew.    Can I just say, the outlet shoppers are a bunch of slobs dropping clothes all over the place.  Well, actually so were the Best Buy customers after the store opened as I did mention earlier some people ran through the store knocking down DVDs along the way.   Watching Linda try to describe Milli Vinilli to the 20 something girl at the music store with old CDs was a hilarious moment.  Yes they were famous; after all they did win a Grammy albeit one that was taken back.   The girl must have thought we were smoking something funny trying to find a CD by guys who lip-synched their music and were popular.   Yeah, we pretty much established we were not the young ones anymore.  We stopped by many of the other stores but I didn't necessarily find items worth buying.   I did however leave Linda on her own for the tupperware store and the Bath & Body Store.   That's just too much of that lotion smell in one place.  I can't walk into one of those bath and body stores without being bothered by the too many fruity smells.

Another year of Christmas shopping is almost done.  Now to see if Fry's has any geeky tech toys on sale.