Brad

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.

DISCUSS BLACK FRIDAY THIS YEAR & WIN AWESOME PRIZES & GIFT CARDS! Here's how it works: Through Monday, November 26th (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 a gift card. I don't expect this to be an issue (it wasn't during the last few years), 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! On Tuesday, November 27th I will randomly select 5 winners from all eligible entries and you will win the prizes shown below: 1st Prize: Apple iPad 9.7" 32GB WiFi Tablet 2nd Prize: Nest Outdoor Smart Security Camera 3rd Prize: Amazon Kindle Paperwhite E-Reader 4th Prize: $100 Gift Card to the Retailer of Your Choice 5th Prize: $50 Gift Card to the Retailer of Your Choice And as a benefit to those who were here early this year, all the posts in the forums up until now aside from the t-shirt club thread will also count towards this contest. Also look for opportunities to earn double entries as we get closer to Black Friday. If you have any questions, feel free to PM me and I'll be happy to answer them. Notice: this contest is not sponsored by or affiliated in any way with Apple, Amazon or Nest.

Just posted the first t-shirt contest. I know all 49 of you still in the club will likely get shirts for being in the club, but feel free to continue entering the contests. You won't "officially" win a shirt from this thread until November, so you can win one sooner in the other contests during the next 2 months.

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 2006-2017 dates: http://blackfriday.gottadeal.com/dates.php I'll accept entries until Wednesday September 26th at 9:00pm ET. At that point I'll randomly select 7 people who posted their prediction and they'll win a GottaDEAL 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, 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 7 t-shirts. As always, you can only win a maximum of one shirt per year. This includes the shirts won by members in the t-shirt club. However you are welcome and encouraged to continue entering contests even after you win a shirt http://i.gottadeal.com/main/images/merch/2018shirts.png

Shirts are now sold out!

46 of 49 have posted so far this month

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.

Yeah it's been 4 years since we did a shirt with that line on the back so I figured it was a good time to bring it back. Note that this year's shirt also doesn't explicitly mention "Black Friday" anywhere in the design which is kind of intentional as well.

Definitely interesting. I expected someone to buy the intellectual property and re-open online as many bankrupt store names have done, but I'd be very surprised if they actually follow through with actual stores. It's tough in the current retail climate to start a brand new department store chain from virtually nothing, even if you have recognized brands to use. They could follow the latest trend which is to have stores that also serve as your mini-warehouses for online orders. But Bon-Ton had so many locations and I can't see a new company wanting anywhere close to even half of those.

OK, exclusively for you club members (and anyone else who reads this thread ), here's this year's BF shirt design. If you've been following this thread the design of this shirt won't be much of a surprise. Front: http://i.gottadeal.com/main/images/merch/2018_front.png Back: http://i.gottadeal.com/main/images/merch/2018_back.png Many of you wanted to bring back the classic tagline on the back, so we did that along with a simple "15 years" design on the front. Also, exclusively for club members, you'll also receive a pair of these matching zipper pouches: http://i.gottadeal.com/main/images/merch/2018_zipper.png Use them to store money, cards, tech accessories - whatever you can think of. You'll each get two of these and they won't be available anywhere else. I'll open up orders if you want additional shirts on Monday.

I plan to start the first t-shirt contest and open the other BF sub-forums next Monday the 10th. I'll also start taking orders for shirts that day as well as post the annual BF forum giveaway details, so that day will kind of be the official start of the BF season here on GD. I removed last year's ads from the BF site this morning and I'm working on a bunch of other stuff behind the scenes to get ready for this year with an even larger focus on the online sales as many of you have discussed in here.

Just a heads up - our annual BF forum giveaway where we give away things like iPads, gift cards, etc... for posting will happen again this year and posts you make now will count for entries, so if you want to start racking up entries, feel free to start posting in this forum. Reply to existing threads, start new ones, etc...

We're still at 49 members. We haven't lost anyone since June and everyone is in for August already. Here's the list: abentley BFgrl79 bluebear Bopeep bossy1 budgetsRsexy chachn8r cherry33778 chester5 cjdav dantegirl deelite Doresia Gator Pam gatorburg giz HanShotFirst hillbillyswife ilikefree jesusluvu jstluvem Kanyon71 kellis4321 kimpooh19 laddhorn LainieB len_mullen m13april magickallight MariahA mcwalker mgreen msyves Peppermint qtpie racerfan redeyejay riven3d rlbarajas rockpzazz sas377 smurfgirl speeddiva stacya stationchief stina629 sunni0913 totallyBF tyreejames Thanks to the 20+ of you who have PMed me your shirt info already. Hopefully I hear from the rest in the next week once everyone comes back for their September posts.

Shout out to the member who PMed me their address and t-shirt size despite not being in the club. Nice try The shirts (at least the first batch of them) are scheduled to be delivered Tuesday. I’ll post pics when I get them along with the “extra” item exclusively for club members

IMPORTANT T-SHIRT UPDATE! OK, going to get a jump start on things for the t-shirts. Assuming you are still in the club, send me a PM with the subject T-Shirt Club and include your choice of size (small through 4XL) and your mailing address. I'll start a list and assuming you all post in September, October and November (or win another contest before then) you'll get your shirt. Sizes are first-come first-serve. I'm doing this early so I know the quantities of each size I'll have left for giveaway and selling and if I need to order more of a certain size.

With less than 100 days until Black Friday, we're going to start looking for help for various Black Friday-related tasks on the site. Below you'll find some descriptions of things that we tend to need help with every year. If you've helped out in the past, send me a PM and let me know if you can help again this year (and let me know if you can't as well). I'll be contacting those of you who I don't hear from in a few weeks to get your status. If you haven't helped out before, 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. We have 3 tasks that we need help with: Ad Posting: We need as many people as possible with excellent availability (primarily during the last week of October and first 2-3 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. Ad Linking: We need people to help link the ad items to the product pages on the store web sites. This involves looking at the 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 the URL. Content Writers: 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 few or as many as you'd like. As always, to make things easier so we don't have more than one person doing the same thing, 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 were able to help out. We typically send gift cards as a thank you, but other arrangements can be made. Those of you who helped with this the last few years are encouraged to help again as you all have done a great job. If you have any questions, you can PM me as well. Thanks

Here are the dates (according to our records) when various ads were posted during the past 12 years: https://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 - 2016 - 2017 - 2018 And don't forget, you can also browse the older scanned ads going back to 2004 at https://www.blackfridayarchive.com

They'll probably combine it with Sears again in a smaller ad.

100 days to go!

48 of 49 already in for August. Really would be surprised to see anyone else drop out the rest of the way. This has been fun and we'll probably do something similar again next year.

100 days from Thanksgiving, tomorrow will be 100 days until Black Friday. Down to double digits this week!

Not crying, haha. We didn't lose anyone in July, so we're still at 49 members. I doubt we'll lose anyone else through November.

We had some spammers send a few hundred PMs today. Luckily a few of you notified us so we were able to ban them and delete those sent messages, although you may still have received email notifications. If you get any spam PMs like this in the future, please either report the message or PM me with the username of the spammer so I can swing the ol’ ban hammer. Thanks

If you were able to combine the Prime Day deals with the Amex 20% back promo.... those were some pretty amazing deals the last 2 days. Hope that promo comes back for BF week.