Where all the crazies live

Posted on November 29, 2011

I wasn’t going to take part in any of the black Friday shopping.

(Do you hear a “but” coming?)

But. Those ads just sucked me in. I had finished most of our Christmas shopping online but still needed a few things.

So at 9:30 pm on Thanksgiving day, Princess, Prankster and I headed out to find some good buys at Wally World.  Along with the other 150,000 people in our town.

Jeez louise I figured it would be crazy but I had no idea.  I actually grabbed a pretty good parking spot and we made our way inside to find our places. I hunkered down at the kids’ pj’s, Princess was at the kids’ comforter sets and Prankster was, well, I don’t know where Prankster was.

At 10 pm the madness began. And all the crazies got crazier. …

Pushing. Yelling. Deadly glares. (No mean lady I’m not trying to take your place in line, I’d just like to pass by so I can remove myself from this fire code breaking nuthouse.) People throwing product to other people. All in the name of saving a few dollars. Which I probably burned in gas as I waited to get out of the parking lot.

We got home a little after 11 pm and even though I wasn’t really tired I made myself go to bed because 5 am would be here soon.

I had to work at 8 am on Friday morning but I couldn’t resist stopping off at Menards before work. They had some great bargains. I got there about 5:40 am and the long was pretty long. When the doors opened and I got into the store there were four carts left. Everyone was walking nice and calm and staying in line to get their cart and I grabbed mine.

Grabbed, as in I had both hands on it and was beginning to walk away with it. Out of no where this huge older guy comes up and grabs it from me. I say, “Excuse me sir, this is my cart.” He doesn’t even look at me or say anything, just continues to pull the cart away from me. So I say a little louder, “EXCUSE ME,” and I was about to say, “this is mine” when I just couldn’t do it because that sounded really selfish.  So he pulled the cart away from me and me being the pushover nice person that I am just let him.  Not that I could have stopped him anyway because he really was huge, but that turkey caused me to spend less money not get all the deals I wanted.

We’ve been needing to get two more booster car seats for Pat’s vehicle and they had them for $20 each. Unfortunately since I didn’t have a cart I couldn’t get those. We also wanted to get a space heater they had on sale but I didn’t think that was going to happen either.  Thankfully I had brought along one of my big gym bags and I had some place to put most of the stuff.

It was pretty crazy but not quite as crazy as Wally world was earlier. I snagged most everything on my list but because of my cart quandary I had to give up a few of the small things too.  I was going to just send Pat back to try to get the heater and and a luggage set (that’s definitely absolutely not a Christmas gift). But last minute the heaters were going fast and so I decided that if I can survive childbirth and manage to somewhat successfully get my two toddlers dressed and fed each day, then I can manuever my overstuffed gym bag, a large heater and the luggage.

First I got the luggage and put some of the smaller things inside the luggage. And then I went and got the heater and tried pulling it with the tape on the box until the tape broke.  So then I kicked it the rest of the way across the store to the registers.

Unfortunately I had parked about a mile away and I was a little concerned about getting all my door busters to my car. Thankfully the Menards staff is amazing and I didn’t even have to ask before someone offered to keep my stuff at the door so I could pull my car up.

As I was driving away I saw the big old mean cart stealer guy walking to his car. It absolutely did not cross my mind to roll down my window and yell something at him like, “YOU’RE MEAN!”  And then it absolutely did not cross my mind that that would be ridiculous to say. And so I ran him over.

HA!  That really didn’t cross my mind. Really.

So all and all my black Friday shopping experience was successful.  Except for the fact that I was super tired, my patience was tried, I was pushed and shoved a couple dozen times and based on the reports of friends I could have probably just got all my deals during normal business hours.

But where’s the fun in normal, right?