Brad

If there are more than 10 winners, you'll receive $5 gift cards instead of $10. Just protecting myself since almost everyone is going with similar guesses...

Last year Staples was open from 6pm to 10pm on Thanksgiving, so it's very interesting that they are going to go back to a Friday start this year.

Time for everyone's favorite contest - the first ad prediction contest Simply reply to this thread with your guess for the date and store for the first ad to be posted on the Black Friday site. Only post one guess and if you edit your post more than 10 minutes after your initial post, your entry won't count, so make your best guess now! For help, view this chart for 2006-2014 dates: http://blackfriday.gottadeal.com/dates.php I'll accept entries until Sunday October 11th at 9:00pm ET. At that point I'll randomly select 5 people who posted their prediction and they'll win a Black Friday t-shirt. If someone ends up being correct on both the date and store for the first ad, I'll send you a $10 Amazon gift card. If more than one person is correct, you all win gift cards. If there are more than 10 winners, the gift card value will be $5 instead of $10. We'll use eastern time zone to determine which day a late-night ad is posted on. Good luck to everyone! IMPORTANT: If the first ad comes out before the contest ends (update: this is the case), there will be no additional winners beyond those who already had their guesses posted, but you can still reply to the thread with a comment to have a chance to be chosen randomly for the 5 shirts. http://i.gottadeal.com/main/images/merch/2015design.png

Let the opening time announcements begin... http://investor.staples.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=96244&p=RssLanding&cat=news&id=2092307

The first ads are usually around October 12-15, so we've got a few weeks to go. I'm hoping to finalize the shirt design before I post the first contest, but either way I'll have that contest posted by the end of the week.

Black Friday is just 2 months from today! Added the holiday & store specific forums today, so get posting!

Bumping this again for any of you who just showed up. For those who are helping, you'll be hearing from me next week to get things going

Haven't talked to Dev about it yet this year, but he knows he's always welcome to do them so it'll just depend on his schedule over the next 2 months.

Toys R Us list: http://www.toysrus.com/shop/index.jsp?categoryId=10811023 They also lowered free shipping minimum to $19.

It's that time where we start looking for help for various Black Friday-related tasks on the site. Below you'll find some descriptions of things that we will need help with. If you want to help out, please PM me and let me know which of the items below you'd be interested in helping with along with any related experience/skills you may have. If you've helped in the past, let me know as well (although I'll be contacting most of you directly). We have 3 tasks that we need help with: Ad Posting: We need as many people as possible with excellent availability (primarily during the first 3 weeks of November including early mornings and nights) and who have above-average typing skills. You'll be taking the scans of the ads and typing up each item in the ad, selecting the appropriate category, entering price/rebate info, etc... This one requires a little more work but you'll get to see some ads before anyone else if you can do these things. We'll give you the exact format to use so you won't be totally lost. Ad Linking: We need people to help link the thousands of Black Friday ad items to the product pages on the store web sites. This involves looking at the BF ad and searching for the same item on that store's web site and pasting that link in a special form. You basically just need to know how to search a store's site using either the item number (if the ad shows it) or the product's name and then copy and paste. Content Writers: This is new for this year - we're looking for those of you who enjoy writing about Black Friday to write articles, guides, interviews, etc... Basically you can come up with your own ideas for pieces, pitch them to me and assuming we don't have something similar, I'll give you the go ahead and you'll see it posted on the site with your name (if you'd like) as the author. You can do as little or as much as you'd like. To make things easier so we don't have more than one person doing the same work, we have a private forum for us all to get together, so if you are chosen you'll get access to that forum where we'll assign tasks and post updates. You won't be alone or feel overwhelmed as we'll hopefully once again have a small army of volunteers this year. We don't expect you to do this work for free - you will be compensated for your time and efforts at the end of the year based on how much you helped out. We typically send gift cards, but if you'd rather have another type of payment, we can work something out. Those of you who helped with this the last few years would be very welcome to help again as you all have done a great job. So again, if you feel you could do one or more of these tasks, send me a PM. If you have any questions, you can PM me as well. Thanks

Could be, but I've been reading that they are focusing on the new Pro and the mini and the new Air won't be out until 2016. Regardless, I already have the Air 2 here so that's what you'll get

DISCUSS BLACK FRIDAY THIS YEAR & WIN AN APPLE iPAD AIR 2 16GB TABLET! We're giving someone on the forum a brand new Apple iPad Air 2 16GB tablet for doing what you all love to do anyway - talk about Black Friday! Here's how it works: Through November 30th (at 11:59:59pm EST), every time you post in one of the Black Friday forums (such as this main Black Friday Discussion subforum, any of the store-specific subforums, Posted Black Friday Ads or Online Black Friday subforums) you'll earn one entry into the contest. We're not going to require your posts to be a certain length to qualify or anything like that - we just want a lot of great discussion. We know there are times when a one-word reply is fine. All posts in all threads in these forums will count, including other contest threads. Be aware that it's pretty obvious if someone is attempting to "game the system" by posting repeatedly to get more entries. If that happens, we will give you ONE warning via PM. If we see the behavior continuing, you will be disqualified from winning the iPad. I don't expect this to be an issue (it wasn't during a similar contest last year), but I wanted to make it clear that myself and the mods will be watching for any abuse. Any member who is banned is obviously no longer eligible to win the contest either. This includes posting multiple times in a row in a single thread when one post would be enough, replying to many threads with nothing but "thanks!", etc... as I said, it'll be obvious if anyone does this, so don't do it. There is plenty to discuss without having to cheat your way to more entries. So create interesting threads, reply to other members' questions, give your opinions on everything that is being discussed. This is a discussion board - let's have some interesting discussion here! The winner will be randomly selected on Tuesday, December 1st and will receive the iPad Air 2 tablet. And as a benefit to those who were here early this year, all the posts in the forums up until now will also count towards this contest. If you have any questions, feel free to PM me and I'll be happy to answer them.

Here are the dates (according to our records) when various ads were posted during the past 9 years: http://blackfriday.gottadeal.com/Dates And here are links to text lists of the items in the ads (at least the ones in our database) dating back to 2003: 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 And don't forget, you can also browse the older scanned ads going back to 2004 at http://www.blackfridayarchive.com

As always, we have several dedicated threads for the hotter items each Black Friday. Please try to keep all discussion related to these items in their official threads. Other threads posted will likely be merged into this main thread.

As always, we have several dedicated threads for the hotter items each Black Friday. Please try to keep all discussion related to these items in their official threads. Other threads posted will likely be merged into this main thread.

As always, we have several dedicated threads for the hotter items each Black Friday. Please try to keep all discussion related to these items in their official threads. Other threads posted will likely be merged into this main thread.

As always, we have several dedicated threads for the hotter items each Black Friday. Please try to keep all discussion related to these items in their official threads. Other threads posted will likely be merged into this main thread.

Added some 2004-2006 ads to http://www.blackfridayarchive.com yesterday. That got me in the BF spirit for this year more than anything else.

We've reached the 100 day countdown. Down to double digits after today

As always, we have several dedicated threads for the hotter items each Black Friday. Please try to keep all discussion related to these items in their official threads. Other threads posted will likely be merged into this main thread.

If you don't score one tomorrow (I'm guessing you probably will as they have a ton of them to sell), let me know as I have one here still in box from November that I'm not going to use

Just announced this morning. Details here: http://www.amazon.com/b/ref=pin15_us_gw_d_airstream_pre-event_GoldBox?_encoding=UTF8&node=11448061011 "Prime Day is a one-day shopping event on July 15, 2015, with more deals than Black Friday. Prime members can shop exclusive deals from electronics, toys, video games, movies, clothing, patio, lawn and garden, sports and outdoor items and more." They might have more deals than they did on Black Friday (and to be honest, most of their deals took place in the days before Black Friday, so it's not a huge number they have to beat), but we'll see if the quality of those deals is Black Friday-level. Also, Target is having their Black Friday in July sale starting on Wednesday of this week.

The countdown continues...

Today marks 8 months until Thanksgiving. We're 1/3 of the way there.

The deadline is tomorrow morning so sign up if you haven't!