beinguseless

I’ve ventured out in the past on previous black friday’s fighting the traffic, parking, and crowds and certainly know what it’s like.  Today I didn’t.  Sure I get aggravated from the hassle and waiting in line but I didn’t see anything out there that made me think “wow, thats way too good to pass up”.  From asking people I’ve talked with during the past view days and some input from various websites it doesn’t seem like many people were going out today.  That’s not to say the stores were empty, I’m sure retailers such as BestBuy, CircuitCity, and many others were packed.  I would be willing to guess that the number of people have declined this year.

Some of the retailers limited their deals to “in store only” which isn’t a half bad idea on their part.  The deals themselves seemed a bit average with some short-windowed exceptions. For me it wasn’t enough to venture out. I also heard from someone first hand that needed to work today that a local mall (not a small strip mall but a two floor multi-anchor store type) received about an average weekend kind of traffic.

So what does this boil down to? People shopping more? Less? Getting their shopping done earlier in the year ad planned around the frenzy? Not as many as attractive deals? Increased online shopping?  There could be many things that would influence the answer.  For this blogger it comes down to two things – 1) Deals weren’t there 2) Online shopping is far more up my alley for the type of shopper I am.  Thanks for the various sites that are available I was able to keep close tabs on the various sales without having to venture out.  These are – techbargains, blackfridayhome, and slickdeals.

Something that was brought to my attention last week is a term called ‘Cyber Monday’ for which  online shopping is suppose to be what Black Friday is for local retailers. I’ll be keeping an eye out for this to see what comes of it and more than likely any such deals will be mentioned in one, if not all, of the sites above.

As a parting question to those to visit – if you went shopping (local or online) what would you consider you best ‘Black Friday’ bargain?