Brad

http://www.gottadeal.com/Deal/146285 in store and online

Just a reminder that the last 30% (and free shipping) of the year for cardholders will be from 12/11-12/24 in case you have rewards that you want to save.

You've been able to in the past when they've had that deal.

I mean, even a huge site like Slickdeals had less than 9,000 posts in their BF forum this year and they have many times the number of members that we do. As BF becomes more "boring" there just isn't as much to discuss year after year. The novelty of the day has worn off - it's why there is much less news coverage when ads get leaked, or when people line up days ahead. Now it's more about that 8 day stretch staring Monday before Thanksgiving and going until Cyber Monday. That's when the deals are and there's a pretty big drop in the number of deals available now compared to last week. And since online deals isn't "sexy" and you can't show funny clips of people fighting to get online deals, there isn't much coverage of it in the media.

It is, which is why we try what we can (contests, etc...) to keep the forum active each year.

If you include the holiday discussion forum (easier to do the math since we archive them all together), last year had about 8,300 posts. This year we're currently around 6,500. Things have been dropping, and it's happening to most forums on all topics as a lot of discussion happens on Facebook now. For example, the main 'Walmart BF ad posted' thread on here had 56 replies. The corresponding post on our FB page had 579 comments.

http://storage.pardot.com/197572/8554/EAN_Kitchen_260x260_12_Days_of_Deals_11.29.16.jpg Themes for each day: 12/4 Kids 12/5 Media/Entertainment 12/6 Entertaining 12/7 Gaming 12/8 Fashion 12/9 DIY 12/10 Travel 12/11 Active 12/12 Tech 12/13 Hobby 12/14 Animal 12/15 Stocking Stuffers

Here's everyone with at least 100 entries: 493 bribri25 406 kanyon71 291 riven3d 186 jaymacfla 151 hanshotfirst 150 bluebear 149 tracy0504 139 bopeep 112 tigger97498 107 jesusluvu 107 elmck

2016 ads have been added to the Black Friday Archive: http://www.blackfridayarchive.com/ I've got the physical BF newspapers going back that far as well. Eventually I want to re-scan those older years to get cleaner copies on the site, but the idea of manually scanning thousands of pages of old BF ads isn't high on the to-do list

sweetdiggity - 14 entries bribri25 - 493 entries bethed - 22 entries tracy0504 - 149 entries sgigi - 2 entries (and they were both for the same post - lucky!)

OK, here is the announcement you've all been waiting for. First, some info: There were 6,847 entries this year which includes the double entries in the "Posted Black Friday Ads" and "Online Black Friday Sales" subforums. The entries were spit out randomly from the database, and then randomized again on random.org. The first 5 to get returned were chosen as the winners. Here are the winners along with links to the actual posts that were chosen as winners: 1337417 - sweetdiggity http://forums.gottadeal.com/topic/268696-best-buy-black-friday-ad-posted/?p=1337417 1335317 - bribri25 http://forums.gottadeal.com/topic/266215-black-friday-live-2016-bigjimslade-update-post-51/?p=1335317 1333982 - bethed http://forums.gottadeal.com/topic/266208-how-do-you-save-for-black-friday/?p=1333982 1337758 - tracy0504 http://forums.gottadeal.com/topic/268693-walmart-black-friday-ad-posted/?p=1337758 1339974 - sgigi http://forums.gottadeal.com/topic/269238-kohls-online-black-friday-sale-discussion/?p=1339974 Congrats to the winners! Look for a PM from me soon to claim your prize. And to everyone else, there's always next time. Thanks for contributing to the discussion

Thanks for the opinions - this is why I posted the thread. Seems like most of you like things how they are which is fine with me.

Just thought of it while going into each different forum that had new posts this morning. Maybe more people would see all of the threads if they didn't have to click around into each subforum to find them all and we could possibly get more discussion on here. Or maybe it would be too confusing

Anyone have any thoughts on possibly combining all the various BF forums on here into just one forum next year and then relying on the forum tools such as tags & prefixes (and descriptive thread titles) to keep things organized? Or do you like having separate subforums for the major stores and for the posted ads? Just wanted to get your thoughts. We've done it this way forever but if you'd rather just have one forum to check for everything, we could try that next year.

Green Monday: December 12 Free Shipping Day: December 16 And don't forget "Black Friday II: Revenge of the Deals", "Cyber Monday 2: Even Cyberer" and all the other attempts to get you to buy more stuff

Time to do some database wizardry to get all the entries accounted for and the winners picked. Hope to have an announcement later this afternoon or tonight

Best strategy seems to be spending it on items that you can't use coupons on anyway (brands like Nike, electronics, etc...), as they would take the value of the Kohl's Cash off your total before applying any % off coupon. For that reason, Kohl's Cash seems to have about an 80% resale value on eBay and elsewhere, because you can't use coupons like today's 20% off on the part of your total the Kohl's Cash pays for.

Online is big because it starts so much sooner. Kohl's started Sunday night. Most stores started Wednesday night. If they want more people in stores, maybe they should start the sales on Wednesday night, close Thursday and then maybe have more deals on Friday?

http://www.target.com

KitchenAid Professional 5-quart model in 3 colors $169.99 at Target after 15% discount: http://www.gottadeal.com/Deal/145896

Better deals on these ending today with the new 20% code DEALSEEKER: Classic Plus: $229.99 - 20% coupon - $30 rebate = $153.99 AR (+ $45 in Kohl's Cash) http://www.kohls.com/product/prd-1392420/kitchenaid-ksm75-classic-plus-45-qt-stand-mixer.jsp?color=White Artisan 5-Quart: $329.99 - 15% coupon - $50 rebate = $213.99 AR (+ $75 in Kohl's Cash) http://www.kohls.com/product/prd-25941/kitchenaid-ksm150ps-artisan-5-qt-stand-mixer.jsp?color=Liquid%20Graphite Pro 600 Series: $409.99 - 20% coupon - $50 rebate = $277.99 AR (+ $90 in Kohl's Cash) http://www.kohls.com/product/prd-124102/kitchenaid-kp26m1x-pro-600-stand-mixer.jsp?color=Liquid%20Graphite

Always on the cutting edge of social media and technology, GottaDEAL is now on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/gottadeal If any of you actually follow us, we'll start having contests and other fun stuff on there And if you'd like to, follow us and then post your IG username on here and we'll follow you back.

* I just moved the threads from the "Online Black Friday Sales" and "Posted Black Friday Ads" subforums to the appropriate individual store sub-forums for further discussion. * The remaining Black Friday forums (this main BF forum & the store-specific boards) along with the Holiday Discussion board will remain open until the end of the year at which point they'll all be combined into one forum and archived with the other years. We'll again keep one Black Friday forum open all year for any discussion that pops up. * As for Cyber Monday, because Cyber Monday has become "Cyber Week" with sales already starting today, and because we don't receive much information ahead of time as far as exactly what items will be for sale, we don't have a dedicated Cyber Monday forum. * Instead, we'll be posting Cyber Week sales information in the main year-round Online Hot Deals forum, and we invite you to please share whatever Cyber Week deals you find there as well. This way there will be only one forum to check for online deals instead of two. Of course you can also check the home page for the latest sales & deals too.

The winner of the $30 gift card was hokie7373! Congrats and check your PMs soon for the code.

Your posts were merged into the main threads about those topics (Hatchimals, etc..)