Brad

fyi, $25 restaurant.com certificates can frequently be purchased for as little as $2 with coupons (there is a thread for coupons in the online deals forum), so i wouldn't expect someone to give you much in return for it.

http://www.kohls.com 30% off code: HOTBUY30 (exp 7/21) Free shipping code: MVC6385 (exp 7/19) As always, use this thread to post the deals you find using the codes and to post updated free shipping codes once the one posted above expires. http://www.kohls.com

BTW, I've also heard already from a couple stores making sure they were a part of the BF site this year. Just yesterday Family Dollar contacted me wanting to know how to make sure their BF ad gets on the site. So while I don't expect Walmart to change their policy, hopefully many of the other stores realize they need all the help they can get this year and are friendly to us :)

Doesn't matter to me. I don't know if any of those options will eliminate the fees. You can try "Gift" and see what happens.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/14/AR2009071403246.html

FYI, I can now accept checks/money orders/cash. If you are interested in this, PM me for the mailing address.

Glad everyone is happy to have the forum open We're really going to need your help this year spreading the word about the site. Things like facebook and twitter can really help us and the more people that know about the site, the better chance of getting ads earlier :)

BTW, here is more info on the bags if anyone is interested: http://www.4imprint.com/search/103721-1513/product/103721-1513/Polypropylene-Reusable-Grocery-Bag-15-x-13 They are 15" x 13" x 10", so they can hold a lot of stuff. http://secure.4imprint.com/imageserver/productimages/4imprint/detailed/103721-1513.jpg

That's good to know. If we do use cafepress or a similar site, I'd set it up so that the shirts are as inexpensive as possible - we wouldn't make a penny on them.

For those of you looking to purchase GD reusable grocery bags, your opportunity has arrived. I will begin taking orders for these bags today. Orders will begin being shipped in 1-2 weeks (or sooner if the PO delivers the shipping boxes before then). Keep in mind that we'll be giving away many of these bags as well, but we wanted to give those of you who just have to have them a way to get them. I've decided that since it's not really feasible to ship one or two of these at a time because of shipping costs, I am going to sell them in 4-packs only. You can buy up to two 4-packs, but that is the limit. Each 4-pack will cost $10 which includes shipping via USPS Priority Mail. At this time, I am only accepting PayPal. In the future I may be able to accept checks/money orders - check back for that info at a later date. To purchase your bags, send PayPal to [email protected]. Be sure the address included with your payment is the address you want these shipped to. It would also be helpful if you included your forum username in the "comments" section (if you are a forum member). There are a limited number of these bags that I am going to make available for selling as I want to give them away as well, so once we start running low, I'll update this thread with a "last call" message. Here is a photo of the bag. I put some common items inside (cereal box, paper towel roll) to give you an idea of the size. They are one of the larger versions of these bags, so they hold quite a bit. http://www.gottadeal.com/images/grocerybag2.jpg

I haven't decided what we'll do about BF t-shirts this year. We're going to have so much other stuff to give away that I'm not going to tell you about just yet (including other BF goodies) so I don't know if we'll have BF shirts printed up in addition to the standard GD t-shirts. One option is to set up something through a site like CafePress.com where you can just order what you want (t-shirts, sweatshirts, etc...) but those kinds of sites use thermal transfers instead of screen printing, so quality is not always great. Maybe that doesn't matter for a shirt most will only wear once or twice. I don't know. It's still early, so nothing is finalized yet. I'm just trying to figure out what the best plan is to allow everyone to get what they want without making a huge amount of extra work for me during an already extremely busy time.

I always have to work BF

Every year we see posts from members who are waiting for the BF ads to get a deal on something instead of buying now. So what, if anything, are you waiting for the ads to find a great deal on this year?

2007 was the last year for CompUSA and 2008 was the last year for Circuit City. With Best Buy being the only national electronics chain left for BF deals, how do you think this will affect tech deals on BF? Will Best Buy "take it easy" knowing their main competition is gone, or will the other major stores that carry electronics and computers (Walmart, Sears, Target, office stores, warehouse clubs, etc...) create enough competition to keep the deals coming? And how will the online shopping aspect of things affect the deals, especially considering there are so many places online to get tech deals?

Realizing that BF is 20 weeks away, compared to previous years, how much do you plan on spending for the holidays this year? Feel free to reply with any comments as well. The results we get for polls like this will be used when making our official BF predictions and possibly for media interviews as well, so your comments could appear in a news story

facebook.com/gottadeal bigjimslade from the forums here has been our unofficial facebook "host" the past year

Some great things planned this year as well. We had the extremely popular t-shirts last year. This year among other things we'll be giving away special "BF survival kits" loaded with GD swag. It's going to be a fun year

I think we might just keep it open year round from now on, lol. BTW, we're not really going to advertise the fact that this forum is open, so it's kind of an exclusive preview for those of you who stick around all year. We'll send out the big "we're open!" mass e-mail to the BF mailing list in a couple months.

As we've hinted to recently, we're going to open the main Black Friday discussion forum a little early this year for several reasons: - to gather some poll results to use for media interviews & our early BF predictions :) - to allow the search engines to start indexing the forum in advance of the BF craziness - because some of you have nothing better to do and want to start talking BF now! We are now 20 weeks away from Black Friday (November 27th this year). The full suite of Black Friday forums (the retailer-specific forums, the Black Friday FAQs and the Holiday discussion forum) will return in a couple months, but for now, keep all Black Friday discussion in this forum. We aren't expecting much discussion right away, so don't be surprised if we go days without any posts in here. To those of you helpful BF forum mods from last year - you can take the summer off - we won't bother you for a few more months Thanks

There is no easy way to do that for one forum. The "Today's Posts" link works like the "New Posts" link in that you can include/exclude certain forums from showing up in those results through your control panel (at the bottom of this page) but you'd have to then change that setting for each different forum you wanted to view. But theoretically, if you excluded all but the Online Deals forum, only that forum's threads would show up when you clicked on either of those 2 links.

It will probably be soon. For now it's only going to be the "main" BF discussion forum - the store-specific ones will open in a few months. I'm not opening it early because there will be a lot of discussion, but more because I want to give the search engines time to index some of the initial threads before the craziness really starts. I also want to post some polls about some key topics to get some data I can use for all the press interviews this year and for our set of BF predictions.

I'll prove it... Based on what is in the ads, I predict that when they are posted, you'll see these comments: "is it just me or are the ads not as good this year?" "well that's one store i don't have to bother with this year" "the ads suck this year - where are the deals?" "that's it! i'm not bothering to go out on BF this year!" So when those get posted, it will prove that I have the actual ads

OK, I lied. I only have 3 ads

yeah, but i already have the first 4 BF ads, so i'm ahead of the game. just waiting a few months to post them

LOL And the BF forums will be opening this month too