So Ashley and I decided to go to Best Buy to get one of their 22″ monitors that they were offering for $200. It was a great deal but they only had a minimum of 10 so we knew that we would have to get there early. We arrived at the store 7-hours early just to be about 50 people deep into the line.
We weren’t discouraged because we figured that everyone would be in line for the $250 laptop that they were offering because we heard several people talking about it around us. The laptop was a great deal but that wasn’t a primary goal and seeing that the minimum was 18 for those, we knew that there would be a very low chance of us getting one.
The weather when we arrived around 10:00 PM Central Time was about 45 degrees Fahrenheit but throughout the night dropped into the high 20’s. That made it a little hard to sleep but I didn’t think I would be doing that anyway.
About two hours before the store opened, Best Buy was sure to have their employees out amongst the crowd trying to sucker customers into getting a Best Buy Credit Card. It worked. I can’t tell you how many people left today with a new credit card. They took all of the information outside, ran their information inside, and came back outside with an account all set-up. An hour before the store opened, the Best Buy employees came back outside to hand out tickets for some of the more popular items, like the $250 laptop. Needless to say we weren’t even close to getting a laptop which is definitely what we expected. They handed out tickets for other things like televisions and XM radio’s but not for the monitor we wanted…which is probably a good thing.
When the store finally opened at 5:00 AM Central Time there was a mad rush for the door and people were cutting in line all over the place. By that time, the line had grown to hundreds of people and was clearly wrapping around the back-side of the building. Being that it is an electronic store there were several police officers there to try and stop any chaos before it would even begin.
I had located where the monitors should be on a previous night so that I would know what kind of box to look for and where to look for them. They had many of the aisles blocked off because they were using them to form lines to the checkout registers…so there was really only one route to get around the store. I eventually hit the spot where the monitors were supposed to be and they were empty. I was among the first back there so my first instinct was that they moved them somewhere else. I began looking around but couldn’t find them anywhere.
Ashley was lost in the mix and I started to see people with two or three of the monitors in their cart. I figured it was hopeless and when I finally found Ashley she had emerged with one! They were apparently stacked in the middle of an aisle that happened to be adjacent to an aisle that I cut through. She said that she was the first to notice the monitors and they were sitting in the middle of the aisle in three-stacks of four, so there were twelve total.
The checkout lines were so long that we were in the store for more than an hour waiting, yet again, in line. So we got the 22″ monitor for just $200 plus buyers received a $15 gift card for every $100 they spent, which means we got a $30 gift card on top of it. Was standing in line that long worth it? It was an experience but it boggles my mind how people did it for days to get the Playstation 3. I know that I would do it again, but maybe not Best Buy.
If you don’t live in the U.S., this gives you an idea of what some crazy Americans do the day after our Thanksgiving holiday. Does anyone else have any interesting stories from their shopping experience today?
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I went to circuit city this morning.
The place was insane!!
But i did get a 2GB flash drive for $25 so i’m happy
I can imagine Circuit City was probably as crazy as Best Buy was. I don’t know that I would do Best Buy again, it was a little too crazy for me. There were plenty of people who thought rules were for everybody but them! Grrr!
Glad you got a deal!
Both stories seem extreme, i cant see myself or anybody i know in England doing that.
But if you got the stuff you wanted thats good news
I hate to tell you guys, but I checked bestbuy.com and found out early that you could click on the item when you were looking at the Thanksgiving weekly flyer, and it would come up with a page where you could add it to a shopping list, or a blue button that said “buy online”.
If you clicked buy online early THURSDAY morning, you could buy just about all the items, except a few of the crazy deals like the $250 laptop. I know the monitor was one, because I was about to cry for talking myself out of buying one. Had it in the shopping cart and everything. I finally decided I need to build a whole new rig at x-mas and just keep my 21″crt and 19″lcd dual setup for now. I did end up ordering the 250gig Western Digital Book harddrive off the back cover of the add, since it was only $69, and no rebates.
I also got the 2gig thumbdrive from Circuit City for $12.99 after rebates, which was better than BB’s that had it for $29.99.
There is still some stuff left on BB.com, check it out.
(sorry, all the monitors are gone, and the site is loading pretty slow right now to boot. :roll:)
Bleh I went at 2am and there were hundreds of people in all best buys. I just went to a game stop at 4am and camped for more Wiis. 50 people in line with 4 Wiis total. 0 PS3S = pissed off people. I was #2 in line though
I really didn’t except to get anything yesterday I just went to Best Buy with my father. And as we were browsing through the store we came across a whole row of their store brand TVs (Insignia). I got myself a 24 inch SDTV for $99 plus a $20 mail in rebate. That was a good deal, I jumped that because my old TV was about 16 years and I need one with component since my gaming wasn’t looking too good on a old TV.
So how do you like gaming on the Wii? That was the whole reason why I got my TV yesterday so that I can game with progressive scan.
I know the monitor your talking about..tickets weren’t sold in lines outside before the store opened for me either (though I wasn’t in the market for one). I was however in a line that had those exact same monitors in a pile stacked right next to me….I literally had to jump out of the way of several shoppers going crazy to get one of the 30 my Best Buy had. Literally when i got in line…1 monitor was taken every second that passed by….it came to the last one and 2 shoppers literally dove for the box and got it at the same time…the woman glared down at the other guy holding it….ready to fully attack him, had he not let go. It was insane
I myself was only in the market for a laptop and any other cheap computer components for a new desktop ill be building soon….my best buy had a line at least 500 people, but i think it was much closer to 1,000 (honestly). I was about 100 people back…knowing that the laptop i was going for i would likely get regardless of those in front. by the time 5 oclock came around people were let in in increments of 50 people at a time, in a single file line, with the automatic doors only a couple feet width open. bestbuy employees and police were regulating the people in line…once in their i waited in computer products line for 3.5-4 hours just to get a chance to get 1 of 6 of the laptops i wanted, luckily i got the 2nd to last one and a good deal on a HDD.
bestbuy is always the worst of all tech stories when it comes to nuumber of people in competion for deals and speed of lines because of it, but they did have the only deal on this laptop in my county, thankfully bestbuy is getting a little more organized when it comes to check out…otherwise i’d have been in line to check out for 6 hours easy. definitely worth the wait..and always a fun experience to see what happens
i saw on my local news several people buying one of only a few Wiis that were in stock in the city on BF and destroying them in front of store lines..to see people’s reactions…never a dull moment on BF, that’s for sure
btw Ryan…what was this deal you get $15 best buy gift card for each 100 dollars spent? was that a national deal or just for you best buy? i hadn’t heard of it, and seeing as i dropped 1000 dollars on BF…that’d have been a good deal…ontop of Reward Zone points and 12% off that I used on purchases.
At a Chicago-area Best Buy that I went to, there were 30 people in line at 7PM. A nearby Circuit City had 10 people waiting, and a CompUSA across the street–which I think was opening at midnight–had about 60 people outside.
Curtiss: Your Best Buy sounded even worse than ours! At least you weren’t hoping to get one of the super hot items that the rest of the mob was going for.
The $15 gift card thing I thought was a national thing because our Best Buy has done it for the past several years. It is is only available for the first seven hours or whatever but maybe you should call them and ask if you were supposed to get one. It also says on your receipt the amount of the giftcard that you were supposed to get.
Jason: I wonder why there was nearly no one in line at your stores? I would have liked to been in those lines much more.
Edit: I just noticed that you said 7PM not 7AM
Jason- which Chicago area Best Buy out of curiosity? Both Ryan and I are from the north suburbs of Chicago.
yeah…living in Madison WI…somethings like BF can be a bit crazy…and of course theirs always Halloween on State Street here with all UW - Madiosn students (once #1 party school)
but yeah that laptop i got a great deal on…and will get something like 20-25 dollars back via Reward Zone card..and a few other small discounts…the laptop ended up costing more towards 800 dollars….but if their was 15 bucks in gift card for each 100 dollars spent..that would have definitely given me a decent amount of spending money in the future.
ill have to check my receipt for it when i get a chance here. Do you know if their is a link to this deal anywhere on their website still or if it was listed anywhere in their BF ad in the newspaper? did you happen to get the gift cards on the spot…or have to get them via mail, or come back for them?…just wondering b/c that money in gift cards would come very useful in the coming month here
You Americans are crazy, though the Boxing Day sales can cause some madness here - never as much as that though.