H_Hancock

Not to mention but even if you are on publicly accessible WiFi, if the web page you're using is encrypted, which almost every store's checkout pages are (you know, the pages with the little padlock icon in the lower right hand corner of the web browser), the hacker still would have to crack the SSL encryption.......and that's just plain not going to happen.

Dang....I just ran out to one of my vehicles and told her her Falken tires were just cheap knockoffs and not real tires. Seriously, you need to broaden your horizons about tires. While you have a few of the name brands out there, you most certainly forgot a few other "real" tire brands that are very much "real" tires.......Yokohama, Avon, Toyo, Sumitomo, Pirelli, Dunlop, Metzler, Vredestein, Cooper, Firestone (mfg'd by Bridgestone).....even Hankook and Kuhmo are considered "real" tires by those who actually know. True, Hankook are manufactured, like a lot of tires now, overseas, and are sometimes old tech compared to some of the advanced designs from Bridgestone, Michelin, etc., but their reputation is pretty darned good for their price. Now, if you are referring to what is known as "house brands" of tires, like Mastercraft, Dean, etc., there may be an argument to be made......possibly. But you have to consider who actually makes these "knockoffs" and "house brands". They certainly just don't appear out of thin air. Instead, they come from factories with names on them like.......Goodyear, Bridgestone, Continental, etc. Here are some "off-brands" and who really makes them: Michelin: Cavalier, Medalist, Riken, Uniroyal Bridgestone/Firestone: BFGoodrich, Caliente, Dayton, Fuzion, Gillette, Grenadier, LeMans, Peerless, Road King, Seiberling, Triumph, Winterforce Continental: General, Semperit Goodyear: Dunlop, Goodyear, Hallmark, Kelly-Springfield, Lee, Monarch, Pacemark, Republic, Star, Steelmark Cooper: Avon, Cooper, Dean, Dick Cepek, Dominator, Mastercraft, Mickey Thompson, Starfire Interesting list and not complete by any means. Now, there are some brands out there I wouldn't buy with your money, much less mine.....esp. any house brand sold by Pep Boys. On the other hand, the house brands from Sears are typically much more dependable. So, there are more to consider than just that short list of yours. Lots of good tires out there.....and many made by someone other than the name listed on the sidewall. :)

I agree the 24" Soyo has a good price for its size, but it's a SOYO! (Sorry 'bout the liberal use of the smilies, but Soyo has left a very bad taste in my mouth, as well as lots of others...........)

It's just as it happened last year. Until BB, CC, CUSA, Staples, etc. had their ads posted, the same cries of lackluster specials abounded. Just wait.....it'll get better.

Did you happen to see the Tom Tom One GPS unit in the Pep Boys ad? Decent price on it and it's one of the more highly rated GPS units out there.....esp. for the money.

Personally, Office Max underwhelms again.....and is worse this year than last. That HP wireless printer is attractive, though, and I was also looking at the Samsung color laser printer. But, BB is calling my name again this year, as it has every year before......c'est la vie.

Not to us.....we travel in a pair, so one is usually keeping an eye on our cart......although we did have someone drop something INTO our cart as we shopped last year. Luckily, it's an item we actually wanted....so we kept it. :)

Since I spend a bit of time in line in front of BB, I layer a bit....and it helps with layering because you can discard layers to adjust to temps. I wear long-john bottoms and fleece-lined jeans, and wool socks and insulated boots for the lower part of me. The upper half gets first a thin bicycle thermal shirt, flannel shirt, have a sweater if needed, and a leather bomber's jacket that's Thinsulate lined. Gloves are optional depending on the weather that night. Two years ago, needed them....last year we didn't. Also keep a large golfers umbrella or two in the car. Four years ago it rained almost all night and those umbrellas came in very handy.....

The liquor certainly would make the wait in line more interesting and entertaining ....

Never needed a first aid kit.....but I do have a basic one in each of my vehicles. Have always carried one in every vehicle.....always will. But rarely have ever had a need to use it.....and never on BF.....but then again we avoid Wal-Mart, Target, and other places that attract unruly mobs. Our Best Buy is so well organized and run that even a small child wouldn't have much to worry about, other than getting separated from his/her parent. The shoppers are well behaved and the store is well run and organized. Won't shop where the shopping degenerates into a Wild West-type free-for-all.

In a typical Best Buy on Black Friday, the customer service desk is open, but is servicing only purchasers of ticketed items....not open for customer exchanges or price matches. And the door buster items.....usually are never found on the shelves prior to BF and won't be found on the shelves after the blitz hours on BF. The UPC codes are different than what's normally stocked, so any prior purchasing and price matching, if that were even possible, would be difficult at best. Take the Westy 32" HD LCD TV last year. While BB carried a Westy 32" LCD TV, the door buster TV was a different item number than their normally stocked item.....rendering it completely useless to buy early as it wasn't stocked before or after BF. The 22" LCD monitor, on the other hand, was a normally stocked item.....and was NOT a doorbuster item, but instead carried a specially discounted sale price for the two-day BF weekend....Fri. and Sat. So this could be purchased and price matched after the 6-hour blitz sale was over as the monitor carried the low price for two days. The same could be done with a lot of the items......but those items listed on the front cover, the doorbusters like the laptops, etc., were unique to that sale, were never stocked before the sale, never stocked after the sale, and were not subject to price matching.

Well, I saw more than a few dozen laptops in front of stores last year...BB,CC, OD, Staples all had their WiFi open and usable during the waiting period prior to the stores opening. Saw LOTS of people internet browsing, etc. on lappies. You aren't the first to think of it.......

I never would have even thought of fake UPC codes. Guess that shows where my head is at. But, when they're working right, they're great. I can zip through so much quicker as the lines tend to be much shorter than those with cashiers. And I can bag my junk the way I want to...no more of a loaf of bread being packed in the same bag as a heavy can, despite the fact both can fit in the bag. Some cashiers just don't have a clue as to what items should be mixed in a bag and what shouldn't. That's one of my biggest complaints.....that and cashiers trying to have a conversation with another cashier while doing my checkout, or conversing on the phone, or with another co-worker who is on break........

The items, esp. the doorbusters, had differing limits. Some were listed in the ad as one per person, some were listed as one per household. Depended upon the item and scarcity and what demand BB thought the item would bring.

After I found out they did work on the Westy, almost made me want to open up the Westy and see what the guts really look like, or what's silkscreened on the pcb and components. Might be surprised..........

Merci, Brad. Nicely worded "I want to spam your members" note, though. I love the "I'd be happy to monetize it" inducement.....kickbacks for your email addresses.....how could you resist?

I see this argument every year and every year it pretty much makes no sense. Here we are 24 days from Black Friday. The stores have, months and months ago, ordered product for this year's BF, set prices, and already have their layouts for their ads developed. Seeing a competitor's ad 2-3 weeks prior to the sale would actually do very little to "help" a competitor.....decisions have already been made and almost all are irrevocable this late into the BF cycle. To make wholesale changes in pricing, say on computers or TVs within a week or two of the sale, would expensive at least......reprints of the sale ads, changing pricing stickers for all the stores that would have already received their BF sales paraphernalia, working out new rebate details with the respective rebate company they've negotiated with, reprint rebate forms, and on and on. Each step costs money, and when you're talking about adjusting prices on doorbuster items, which are the items that typically draw the most people to the store, I'd think the store chain would be hesitant to do so.....esp. since most doorbusters are sold at cost or even below cost, hence their being called "loss-leaders", and which is why they are sold in such limited quantities. Granted, two years ago Wal-Mart did put out an addition to their sales ad that had adjusted a few prices and/or added a few items, but that was an exception....a big exception....rarely done. Last year Best Buy had added an additional doorbuster laptop to their lineup, one not in their advert....a $250 Toshiba lappy. Again, rare action, but that was probably easier to accomplish than making changes throughout the system to current pricing. Honestly, I don't think leaking the prices gives much of a competitive advantage to anyone in this instance. This is a sale that's planned so far in advance that at this late date, almost everything is pretty much already set in stone. I think it's more that upper management gets at least perturbed and maybe embarrassed by the continuing fact that middle and lower management continue to be unable to keep their pricing, much less their entire advert, from leaking outside the corporate umbrella......which just shows upper management that they continue to have less control than they actually think they have over what really happens outside their windows.

Good posting, Jim. Another point to make about Best Buy and why they have the long lines, esp. the last few years.......no rebates to contend with. BB's prices, esp. on the doorbuster items, essentially match all the other stores after their rebates....but BB ditched them a couple of years ago, so now you get the "cheap price" with no rebate hassle or wait......just straight cheap price out the door. One other thing......as for the customer service desk, at least at the BB we go to......it's not used as a general checkout counter but is instead reserved for shoppers who had the ticketed items, such as desktops, laptops, all the ticketed TV's, etc. You'd shop and get all the unticketed items you want.....and then stand in the customer service line instead of the general checkout line, to pay for all your items. This made the checkout faster for everyone. If you had no ticketed items, you stood in the usual checkout line. If you had ticketed items, you stood in the customer service line. Behind the CS desk, they had all the laptops and desktop computers that were ticketed, and provided special pickup tickets to procure your TV or whatever that was too large to fit in your cart. You then drove to the rear of the store to acquire your larger item.....and they'd load it into your vehicle for you, too. This really worked out very well for everyone.

Dredging up last year's Best Buy Westinghouse 32" LCD HD TV....did anyone who uses DirecTV in their house get their DTV remote to function with the Westy TV? I seem to remember, and my memory gets quite faulty as I get older so it may have been discussed and previously solved, that a lot of people were having problems getting a DTV remote to work with that TV, myself included. But, I made a weird "discovery" a week or two ago. I've got DTV in three rooms....one has the Westy in it, one has a cheapie Philips 20", and one has a Sony Trinitron 36" in it. Well, I mixed up the remotes and mistakenly tried to use the one programmed for the Sony on the Westy......and it worked. Even called up the TV's own internal menu program, just like the TV's own remote control. So, I tried reprogramming the DTV remote that is being used for the Westy's room......programmed it for a Sony and worked like a charm. Last year, no amount of plugging in Westinghouse numbers ever got the DTV remote to do anything with the Westy LCD....not the volume, not turning it on or off, and certainly not accessing the TV's internal menu. Odd that the Sony programming codes "unlocked" the remote to work with the Westy LCD.

And that's pretty much the way it works. The doorbusters typically are SKU'd differently than what is being sold at present in whatever store you care to consider. Take all the laptops sold over the last few years in any of these stores. Almost without exception, the laptop wasn't part of the store's normal stock, or if it was, as one laptop was at Wal-Mart, it won't be stocked normally until after BF. With the laptops the last few years, the doorbuster lappies weren't even listed on the websites of the particular manufacturer until just a few days before BF. Now, the price guarantee could work for items like hard drives, printers, toys, etc., that are just marked down from normal pricing. But for the doorbusters, you'll have a hard road to hoe to get the price guarantee to work.

Taking your scenario, wnielsen1, I have a few questions.... First, who is going to pay for all the security you'd have to have present from Thursday afternoon until Friday morning at 3AM? Second, it's a rare store that has an exclusive parking lot....most of these stores share parking, so when you block off the parking lot, you're going to block off the other stores, too. Third, who pays for the porta-potties? They aren't free......or cheap. You have a lot of good ideas, but unfortunately, they almost all cost the store......and the expenses the store would have to foot would make it unreasonable to expect any store to swallow these expenses. Now, as to how the BB handles the BF crowd at the one I go to........the line is left on its own until around 2AM on BF. At 2:30AM, the store had two county deputy sheriffs show up that had been hired for door/crowd control.....one positioned himself at the entrance/exit and one cruised the line settling line disputes. Worked out pretty well and if there was a line crashing problem, and there was one last year, a patrol car was called in and the crasher, if he/she didn't remove him/herself voluntarily, was removed with help. Last year, the crasher claimed he was there for hours, but when 20 people surrounding him disagreed, he was bleating his lone story......and was lying about being there.....and got removed by patrol car from the store and parking lot. I was first in line last year and after the next 5-10 people arrived, I started being asked how the line was being run. It seemed that the others were deferring to me as I was there first and had been granted ersatz "control" of the line. I found it odd, but I did take the responsibility upon myself at that point to set some rules down. I told everyone else they were on their own as to keeping track of who was in front and behind them.....to prevent line crashing. Once this was established, it did work out quite well. Only had one instance of someone trying to crash the line.....and it was taken care of very quickly by a deputy and the line sitters. The BB leaves outside most of their shopping carts, so when I arrived and found them and that I was first, I took it upon myself to set up a barricade of sorts using them. As most all BB's are arranged the same, you can probably understand how this worked (the entrance door on the right, the exit on the left, and a couple of stationary panes of glass in between.) I lined up carts outward, in between the exit and entrance using the stationary glass as the wall, then when the carts reached about three people wide, I made a 90 degree turn with them and had them run down the side of the store, thereby separating the exit from the entrance and barricading the entrance. Worked out very well. I made it quite clear I had one spot saved for my wife.......and as that I had arrived at 9AM or so on Thursday, and she was getting there by 9PM Thursday (which she did), no one had a problem with it. As far as saving spots for others, I told them that they should check with those surrounding them if it would be alright if a spot was saved. Seemed to work out well, too. I did make it clear I personally wouldn't like it if one person was in line and then six others magically appeared two hours before the store opened.....and this was generally accepted as how it'd work. One spot at most saved.... I also made it clear that once you'd spent time in line, leaving and returning should be alright.....esp. for toilet runs and food runs. I, myself, made a few trips away from the line......I went to CUSA at midnight for their opening. No one had any problems with this, either. I left at 11:30 and returned at 12:30....and not one peep of dissent was heard by anyone. Guess being first had its advantages. As far as tickets......the store managed this as well as can be expected. It was first come, first served. Items that were limited to one per household.....the employees tried to follow through with that limit by asking people for ID's before handing out those tickets. It was kinda obvious when several people were grouped together as a unit. Weird, I know, but groups tended to stay more clumped together and were fairly easy to pick out from singles.....that, and the surrounding line would inevitably alert the ticket givers of groups trying to pose as singles. Amazing that the line self-regulated very well.

Black Friday is mainly an electronics shopping day for us.....so Best Buy is our first choice each year, esp. since BB got rid of the rebates almost entirely on their products two years ago. I do enjoy the doorbusters and the like being priced "out the door" in the BB ads vs. the "after rebates" junk that CC and CUSA seem to cling to. I wish Fry's and MicroCenter were closer. Maybe one day I'll just give in and make the 3+ hour trip to ATL to wait at one of those. Of course, I'm driving almost 2 hours to get to the BB we frequent for BF, but it's a lot easier drive than going to ATL. We avoid Wal-Mart like the plague on BF.....at least until the early bird crowds die off. Typically, we'll hit a Wal-Mart that's in a small town on our drive back home....in Waynesboro, GA. Even after 12N....over the last 2-3 years at least....stopping in at noon or later at that particular WM gave a better experience....no crowds and still almost all the doorbusters still in stock. They do tend to run out of the laptops and desktop computers and some of the toys, but the rest are usually around. But WM is our very last stop before hitting the house. We hit Sears after BB.......I try to be within the first 5-10 in line at BB, so we can get in and out in under a half hour. Last year, was first in line.....was back on the road in less than 25 minutes.

I think she was simply referring to the problems that occurred last year when the Wii was introduced.....there were many instances of violence against people who exited with the valued and scarce item. On BF, though, I doubt that there will be anything like Wii problems. In all the years I've camped out for BF, I've yet to encounter a single problem, other than line jumpers. Here's a suggestion......if you have intentions of camping out for an extended period, possibly do drive-bys periodically to check the line or lack thereof....if you live close enough to the store you want to camp out at. Spend the rest of your time at a close-by 24 hr. Wal-Mart or coffee shop or the like.....or use your home as your home point. If your store is too far away to do the above, you could always go to the store and just park in the parking lot and remain in your vehicle, locked up of course, until others appear. If you get bothered by unwelcome people, you can always start your vehicle up and drive off.....and find a cop. :)

I've rebated for years.........and had only two out of several dozen rebates submitted ever give me problems. But here's a whine for you and let's see you solve it. PNY memory rebate from Newegg. Sent it in with all paperwork....and yes, before you hastily and condescendingly ask, copies were made of each and every scrap of paper sent in. Got an email 4 weeks later stating they only got the UPC, nothing else. Hmmmm.......so how did you email me if I forgot the rebate form, I reply. Mysteriously, several pieces of info they claim was missing suddenly show up on their website as being there.....all but the receipt. It's missing....and it wasn't, but anyway.....they gave me a fax number to resubmit it....and I did.....all of it. Now, 8 months later, I'm going round and round with PNY because.....get this....I didn't pay enough for the memory to "qualify" for the rebate. Nowhere on the form did it state I had to pay $XXX amount for the memory. I cannot help it that I had credit with Newegg at the time and it was applied to the price I paid for the memory. As far as I'm concerned, I paid full retail. The credit was on a return of a DOA item that I chose to have the refunded monies kept at Newegg for credit instead of returned to me....I was in the process of building a couple of systems and was going to eventually use the credit anyway, so didn't make much difference to me. But to PNY....I guess I stole the memory or something. Newegg has repeatedly contacted PNY about the situation. I have forwarded the documentation that led up to the credit being applied to my Newegg account and the purchase process I went through for the memory. But PNY continues to deny the claim.....and now, since it's way outside the time frame of the rebate, they are now starting to say it's too late. A true no-win situation. I'm not going to pursue it much further....my time is somewhat valuable and I figure I've got more than the measly $40 the rebate's worth in time invested in this debacle. So, sometimes it's NOT OUR FAULT, despite any condescending attitude you try to put off on anyone else.

We do have a Wal-Mart about 15-20 min. from our house...but I shall NEVER, EVER set foot in another WM on BF ever again...made that mistake about 10 years ago and I'll never repeat that. BB, CC, and the rest of the big box stores are a minimum of 70 minutes away if we go to Savannah, but the stores in Savannah have yet to learn about crowd control. So we go to Augusta.....and takes us 90 min. or more to get to them. But compared to other stores....the Augusta stores are a pleasure to shop in on BF, so the extra travel time is well worth it.