Firstly, Happy Thanksgiving to everyone! I hope you stuffed yourself silly in a calculated and controlled manner. I hope you enjoyed time with your families and relatives or the company of friends. I hope you did not see the Seahawks game that showed the nation just how inept of an NFL team we really are. And lastly, I hope you were able to get to sleep early so you can be ready, alert, and in the zone when you're pile-driving some poor old lady into the ground to take advantage of whatever Black Friday deal you have your sights on much too early tomorrow morning.
With my aversion to large crowds and getting up at 3AM, I'm able to gladly skip the chaos that is Black Friday. No deal that I have seen in a newspaper advertisement has ever convinced me to brave the elements at ungodly hours and put myself into a situation with a high chance of resulting in physical altercation and mental assault. I find deals throughout the year via vigilant internet searching and crafty timely plays. Quite frankly, saving 50% is not enough me to deal with the crowds. The way I see it, if you must brave the stores on Black Friday your strategy should be of a quick-kill assassination operation. Know what you want, get in, and get out as quickly as you can while dealing with the least amount of resistance. I don't understand the people who will be at the stores when they open at 4AM and attempt to search out the best deals available. I liken this strategy to a recon mission into hostile territory run by grunts -- strength in numbers and ready to use brute force. And I'm sure you've heard the stories of riots happening as people are waiting in line for $299 laptops. No thanks, neither role is for me; I prefer to strike unseen from the distance: a sniper. And this is where the internet comes into play.
My views on good deals contrast those of my heritage. To a person of Chinese descent, I would liken an item on sale to anti-Kryptonite -- they have to have it; it empowers them. It doesn't matter if the item in question is necessary, wanted, or even useful. Nor does it actually matter if an item on sale results in a good deal: my family's first computer was obtained by driving to Portland to take advantage of Oregon's lack of sales tax. I cite two more examples.
The first involves my parents. They recently got new cabinets for their kitchen and one of my jobs was to move some food items from boxes into the cabinets. One of these boxes contained canned goods. As I transferred the cans I started to notice that some of them seemed quite old -- the pictures were faded or the labels seemed to have been designed in a much simpler time. Turning a suspicious can over, I spied an expiration date of Oct. 2006. Ugh, two years; not bad, but it would have to go. Long story short, my pile for expired cans (or cans without dates!!!) started to grow bigger than what I was putting into the cabinet. My oldest recorded can expired on Feb 1999... almost ten years ago. I looked at the tainted pile: what the hell were my parents going to do with ten containers of canned corn, and how could they not have used it in ten years? My only conclusion was that it must have been on sale. As had the porked beans, yams, and Asian stuff I had never even heard of. Add this to the many times my parents would ask me if something I bought was on sale, and scold me when I told them no (never mind the fact that my item cost far less using an online retailer than if the item was on sale at a brick or mortar store). Perhaps at some point the word "sale" became a substitute for opium to my people. You ever see those bright flashy "SALE" signs that have the super low price of "$299.99!!!" and inspect the sign closer to see the original retail price of $299.99? Those signs were made for Chinese people.
My second example comes from the school of "free gift with purchase." If you've ever shopped for computer parts or electronics, one of your first stops has probably been
newegg.com. A long time ago, they used to offer free "gifts" with purchase of something else. These items ranged from a newegg branded pen to t-shirts to a glass paperweight. At the time my friend of Chinese descent was building himself a computer. With a basic parts list of at least ten components, the possibility of ten free gifts must have been so overwhelming that there was an explosion in his genes. So overwhelming perhaps that he suffered slight blindness and missed the part where it said "one free gift per order" on the item screen. And missed all the extra charges for items in his shopping cart. And again on the final checkout screen. With newegg charging $6 for stickers and $15 for the paperweight, I can only imagine his disgust when he realized his mistake. He called me the next day after placing his order, wondering if I had been charged for gifts when I had ordered from the "egg". I told him no, that I only chose a free T-shirt. I could hear the gears in his head turning, and cut into the silence by asking him how many promotional items he ordered: "All of them." Luckily he was able to contact customer support to cancel all the extraneous items, but I wonder how much use he actually would have gotten from that paperweight. I can hear the responses now: "It doesn't matter! It was free!"
Based on all of the above you must think I'm a free spirited consumer, buying at manufacturer's suggested retail prices and throwing in a tip to the cashier who rings me up. This couldn't be further from the truth; I like deals as much as the next China-man, but I'm able to whip my demons into a think tank. Firstly, when I want to buy something I do an extraordinary amount of research. My home theater system purchase was the result of 1.5 months of review magazine research, audio/visual forum participation, and price hunting, boiling down to a highly configured excel spreadsheet documenting three price level variations of the home theater complete with ranked prices from at least three different vendors for each component. I mean, I run google searches to find out things like which brand of orange juice is touted as "better" than others (Tropicana Calcium + Vitamin D). And people wonder why my collegiate GPA was so low. Secondly, I know how much I want to pay for something. I'll hunt down coupons or codes or wait for promotions or even meet up with shady to semi-shady people from Craiglist (although, not again will I ever consider buying electronics from Craigslist). And with the exception of
Madden games and the occasional purchase, I'm willing to wait. My favorite days are when new version of products are released. Oh, what's this? The Mizuno Wave Rider 10 running shoes are coming out? Which stores sell the 9s...
People must admit though that once in a while a deal knocks you right off their feet (yellow or otherwise). While I stated above that no newspaper ad brought up any such things this Black Friday nor am I usually an impulsive buyer,
Amazon.com dropped something in my e-mail inbox I could not ignore. They are running a contest where you vote for an item you want to go on sale (six days, three items each day) and the items that get the most votes get the steepest discounts. After this voting process, the participants are randomly selected to have a chance to purchase the items. Day 1 consisted of three PlayStation 3 bundles, and the one with the most amount of votes will be sold at a ridiculous price of $199. Take into account that the console itself costs $399 and the bundle comes with the
Pirates of the Caribbean Blu-Ray trilogy, remote controller, and a game, and you might begin to appreciate the ridiculousness of this deal.
Even more exciting, I was selected to be able to purchase one of the Round 1 bundles tomorrow morning so against my general stance of abstinence during this time of year, I will be participating in Black Friday. While I never had any intention of getting a PlayStation 3, the ludicrous price promising a high pay-day for this unemployed blogger coupled with no potentially homicidal lines makes this a no brainer for me to try. However, I'm sure many other people are thinking the same way. With 500 units available and who knows how many "randomly selected" participants, I will sacrifice some sleep and be up at 6:30AM (again, it will be three minutes of work for an estimated $250+ payday with no crowds to deal with) trying to be one of the lucky ones to secure this bundle. I'm imagining they will all be sold out within minutes, so I guess in fact this Black Friday while I am still sniping, I will be battling as a grunt -- although perhaps a metaphor of a grunt who's battle strategy is a coin-flip is more appropriate. What sets me apart from the other grunts at the stores though is that I'll be able to do my business naked and can go back to sleep right afterwards physically safe and with my sanity still intact.
The movie itself is a remake of a Thai horror film and is an OK watch despite using the now familiar Asian theme of spirits haunting people, yet helping others to find out the truth. What bothered me was the casting choices. The roles aren't actually miscast, but they use a series of C-List actors that you've probably only seen in one thing, and they really stick out at you. This movie starred Charlie from The Mighty Ducks, the Australian chick from Transformers (who had a very hard time hiding her accent, by the way), Roy from The Office, and Matt: the Michael Jackson looking guy from Nip/Tuck.
Every Halloween, you can look forward to three things: Girls wearing the sluttiest things they can find, children dentists gleefully wringing their hands together, and a fresh installment of the Saw franchise. I'm not going to lie to you: the ending of Saw IV had me extremely confused; I could not tell you what happened in the last five minutes of the movie, as they spliced in parts of the ending of Saw III, and may or may not have included a character that hadn't been seen since Saw II... yeah. That said, everything is explained in Saw V fairly early on so we can continue on to random (well, maybe not so random) scenes of torture.
When I first saw the trailer for The Midnight Meat Train over a year ago, I couldn't help but laugh out loud (that means "LOL"). The trailer itself painted an absolutely ridiculous picture, culminating with the title finally revealed. It looked like a slasher movie taking place in the New York Subway system starring the douchebag from Wedding Crashes. Oh, how wrong I was. Actually it does star the douchebag from Wedding Crashes, but he only headlines the great cast of Vinnie Jones (yes, Vinnie "I'm the Juggernaut, bitch!" Jones), Leslie Bibb, and Brooke Shields.
