disneybrat

You don't think all the emails BEFORE Black Friday verifying you could do this already gave them a heads up? THe way I read my email, Target knows people will do this and it's a "service" they specifically offer to differ from the competition. I think letting them know that having that advantage ultimately leads to more sales is nothing but positive.

Just want to throw out this suggestion. I'm getting ready to email Target about my good experience, how much I appreciate being able to PA, and how that policy led to them getting the largest chunk of my BF shopping. If we want this policy to continue, I think corporate needs to know how we feel. People usually only contact corporate to complain. I think we need to get as many people as possible to make sure Target knows this PA policy gives them an advantage over other stores.

No problems at all. Took awhile though - seemed they have new people working at our customer service area and only one girl had experience so she was trying to talk both of the other workers through their adjustments. But other than the time, no problems at all and there were a couple others doing the same thing. The Christmas Vacation DVDs came up $1 higher so instead of fighting with the computer she handed me a $3 voucher - so I was up another $1 on top of my $71 credit!

Target (last night, will PA tomorrow): Dirt Devil vacuum DVD player (needed a cheapie for my room - rarely use one, but the one I have now hums so loud I have to crank the volume up to hear, LOL!) House Season 2 Annie Goonies Christmas Vacation I almost grabbed the 500GB external drive and now wish I did. I really need one since my laptop is only 40GB. If they still have them when I run in to price adjust, I'll pick it up. Best Buy: TomTom One LE Flight of the Conchords Season 1 I was giddy when I read today that HBO DVDs were half off. I went to pick it up the day it was released but saw it had no extras so decided to wait and let someone get it for me for Christmas since I already recorded all the episodes to DVD when they were on On Demand. But at $13.49 I had to jump.

I emailed Staples to get the official company policy on price adjustments and apparently there isn't one. The response I received said it is "up to the discretion" of each individual store. So you may have to call and speak to a manager of the specific store to find out what they plan to do in regards to the price adjustment policy. And be sure to note name, date and time if someone hassles you when you get in there.

If you can go mid-week, that's best. Weekends tend to sell out since you have the regular tourists plus locals. That stretch between Pop Warner week and the week before Christmas are best. It used to be totally dead between Thanksgiving and Christmas and word got out about the low crowds and Christmas atmosphere so it's picked up a little. But if you get there mid-week middle of December, it should be less crowded. I love Disney's parties. I think they're worth the money unless you go on a sold out night. I suggest not going to a park earlier that day. Since parks are open til midnight, it can be a late night. And if you can stick it out til after the fireworks, the crowds file out. That last half of the party (between the two parades and after the fireworks) are pretty dead, so if you're rested and can run til midnight, you're set. The parties start at 7PM officially, but they start letting you into the parks at 4PM on your party tickets. Unofficially of course. But every party I've gone to, we've arrived between 4 and 5 and they had set up half of the turnstyles for the party.

You know what, I'm not sure. I never did a presale with coupons so I'm not sure how that works. You might just have to call the store and ask - probably a manager. I'm not sure if the system stores coupon info or if you could leave the coupon with the package and have them make sure there's a note for the manager that finalizes to make sure the coupon is included? Worst case scenario, is show up 2 days early. The store can also do holds for up to 48 hours. So you could pick out everything you want and put a hold on it (we stored in back) and then pick it up with your coupons that day.

It's a big YMMV. I know I was tripping over packages back in the bridge jewelry for days before the sale.

You don't have to have the ad with you. But in general, people don't know what's onsale until they see the ad so they can't really presale til the ad comes out. Well, unless they presale and keep their fingers crossed that something's getting marked down on a certain day, LOL! You just take the things you want to buy to the register and tell them you want to presale for a certain date, in this case 11/23/07. No ads necessary.

I don't mind at all. Hopefully people can take advantage of this service. And I hope that other stores are just as laid back as mine was with all of this. You never know when an individual store or manager will decide, nope, not on my watch. I mean, it's company policy to do this, otherwise the option wouldn't be in the computer. And we were pushed to sell people on presales (especially cosmetics when the new bonuses were coming out) because it really pushed the numbers up for the first day of the sale. But you never know when you'll run across the one person that decides they don't want to deal with finalizing the sales on a busy day (even though honestly, my manager could do a dozen presales in less than 5 minutes) Oh, and you didn't have to presale in each individual department. Can't remember if I mentioned that and I'm too lazy to look back, LOL! Unless you had something that had to stay locked up, obviously. But you could get clothes, housewares, accessories, etc and just presale them all together in one department. Didn't have to presale in each individual department and then try and remember where you had to go back to so you could find all the stuff you paid for.

Presale and preview hours are two different things. Preview hours, what basically happens is they start the sale early. While I was working there (I ended up coming back when my manager called me up to see if I'd take a part time shift and stayed til April) EVERY single sale went live at 5PM the day before - so that's another hint for those shopping. If a sale starts on Friday, at 5 on Thursday the sale prices are active in the registers (except morning specials), they just aren't signed yet so you have to know what's going to be onsale. If it was slow and I had time, I used to point out the big sales to customers so yo can try asking if the employee looks friendly. One trick is to look for signs with pieces of paper sticking out. That's how we knew which signs to flip out at the end of the night - the ones wth another sign folded with sale info inside and sticking either up or out of the current sign. This obviously won't work for Black Friday since the stores aren't open on Thursday, but they had fantastic deals all Christmas season last year, so it's something to keep in mind . . . go in the night before and get first dibs on regular sale merch. Oh, and we used to flip the signs in that last hour. So if a morning special sign is put up, then the employee can override the price and give it to you. Good reason to stick around til just before store close. A presale is basically reserving your merchandise until the sale starts. The cashier will start the process by ringing up all your merch and scanning your credit card. The computer will store the credit card, but not charge it yet. When the sale starts, a manager will complete the transaction. Then you come in and pick up your bags. You can do presales as far ahead of time as you know there will be a sale. So if you ge a sale ad 2 weeks before a sale, you can go in and pick out those items you want from the ad and "reserve" them until the sale starts. It's a little hard to explain. If I made no sense, just ask me to repeat and I'll try and describe it differently, LOL!

That's exactly what I'm saying! Not sure if they'll let it sit there for 3 or 4 days after the sale, as sometimes there isn't a whole lot of room to store these things and they can add up pretty quickly with the handful of people who know about it. . . but we had people pick up days later. Usually we told people to pick them up later that sale day. But honestly, they could come in whenever. If it's going to be awhile, call the store (probably the dept. you did the presale in - could be merch from all over the store, but if we presaled it in one department, then the packages stayed in that department) on the day of the sale and let them know you'll be in another day to pick it up. As long as they know you didn't forget about it, it shouldn't be a problem and they shouldn't refund them or cancel the transaction. The way it worked, on the register there was a special option we'd do for presales. So when the cashier chooses to do a sale or a return - pretty much the same thing. It's just yet another option. When you go to the presale screen, it asks the cashier to enter the date of the sale. So they'd enter the date for Black Friday. If it's a Morning Special, maybe have them hand write on the slip that stays with the bag in the store just so the manager knows it has to be finalized before 1PM. But the slip will say on it what date the manager is to finalize the sale. I don't know if some stores will give you a hassle, we didn't. But with BF, you never know what individual person will get their panties in a wad. The way our managers and store manager looked at it, you HAD to come back to the store to pick up your deals. You just might find more when you come in to pick it up. So they didn't mind at all presaling the morning specials.

Our closest Walmart price-matched doorbusters last year (their first year open for BF) It just had to be within the same hours that the deal was good for at the store you were matching from. My aunted wanted the House DVD that was on sale at Circuit City and they were sold out by the time we got there. So we took the ad to Walmart and picked it up. The head cashier gave us a hard time (we'd gotten the ok by phone from the store manager before we even stepped foot in the store) and kept trying to give us excuses, including they didn't PM doorbusters and when we made her investigate further she came back and said because the picture in the ad didn't match, she couldn't do it. The CC ad last year had the pic of Season 2 even though Season 1 was on sale. The girl was just so nasty from the beginning (we've had run-ins with her since and heard from a friend who's the pharmacist there that she's always nasty) We left, called the store manager and told him what happened and he himself told us next time we were there to ask for a specific person back in electronics and they'd take care of it from there. What's really funny is my aunt had to go to the customer service desk to take something else back when she went to pick up the DVD. She overheard (hours later) this head cashier complaining to another employee about us, LOL! She had NO clue my aunt was there until my aunt said, "Oh, I see you still haven't gotten over it, have you?" The girl was in shock, LOL! When we left, a few managers were standing just outside the door including the one my aunt had spoken to on the phone a couple times that day so she stopped and thanked him for being so nice and treating her so well. She did mention overhearing the cashier and he was livid. As we were leaving he was telling the other managers he had to go in and talk to her AGAIN. Didn't seem too happy. So the lesson here is if you don't get the answer you like from a cashier, ask the store manager as nicely as you can!

Just want to give everyone a heads up. I'm sure most stores are the same way, but last year I took a holiday job at Macy's and was working in the jewelry and accessories department. I know that in that area alone, we had dozens of doorbusters that weren't mentioned at all in any ad. Other departments had extra deals as well. If you don't have a Macy's credit card, open one up on that day. They had upped the discount for that weekend for new cardholders. And if you plan to spend a good bit of money, be sure to pay the $25 for the Thanks for Sharing program. You'll get 10% of everything you spend after you sign up back in gift cards between that day and the end of the year. I think they sent them out mid-February. So if you plan to spend more than $250, you'll come out ahead. And one great thing you can do at Macy's that most people don't know is presale. Very few people knew about it when I worked there, and actually it was mostly employees and hard-core customers that had learned all the tricks. You go find everything you want and then take it to a register to be rung up. The cashier will scan everything and scan your credit card. The register then spits out a couple of reciepts. One is your copy, one is attached to the packages with your stuff. You leave it there. On the day of the sale, a manager will complete the transaction and it'll automatically be charged to your card. Then you just come in whenever and pick it up! The thing with presale is a lot of the seasonal employees have no clue how to do it, so you may have to ask around and get a regular employee.

If I'm not mistaken, this is my first post here, although I've been lurking for a couple years. Great info here. I was thinking about this since this threat has been directed to quite a few sites around the 'net. What's to stop anyone from posting text descriptions of items in the ad without scans and without specifically mentioning the store? I wonder what they'd do?