LIVE Webcast This Saturday (Nov 20) @ 7pm Eastern - Your Questions Answered!

[bigjimslade]

Since our Saturday webcast was such a success we will be having another webcast this Saturday which is Nov 20 at 7pm Eastern.

 

We will be covering all topics Black Friday. We will be going over all current ads and answering your Black Friday questions LIVE.

 

Last Saturdays webcast lasted 7 hours since so many people had questions and had fun chatting. As long as people are chatting and asking questions we will stay on the air live. All you need to do is join us at the link below Saturday at the times listed below. If you want to chat you need to sign up for a ustream account which is free and fast.

 

Show Link: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/black-friday-live

 

We are the ONLY Black Friday site that does this and gives a chance for people to get all their Black Friday questions answered live. Please join us.

 

Be there. Aloha.

 

 

Show Starts @ 7pm Eastern

 

* Atlantic - 8pm

* Eastern - 7pm

* Central - 6pm

* Mountain - 5pm

* Pacific - 4pm

* Alaska - 1pm

* Hawaii - 1pm

* GMT - 11pm

* Tel Aviv Israel - 1am

* Bombay India - 4:30am

* Tokyo Japan - 8am

[tinkrbel]

Thanks for doing this again. I will try to have actually reviewed the ads seriously this time around :)

[mgmckny]

It was fun, I only stayed for a little while as I don't have a lot of BF questions this year, not a big list.... Will probably do it again on Sat as I enjoyed watching the chat, can't keep up with all of it.....Ended up signing out as I started developing a migraine from trying to keep up (probably already on the road to it though as I had been working on classwork for my online class for 2 hours before I signed in...). This is the only site besides facebook that knows me as mgmckny, I am Smartmomma or some variation of that name on everything else these days.

[stationchief]

Next saturday will be even more fun since most, if not all, of the ads will be released by then. Be there!

[bigjimslade]

Thanks everyone for watching me last night and into the early morning hours! Thank you to all of the mods and station chief who kept the chat going and in order.

 

This Saturday's webcast should be fun and we should have most and if not all of the ads to talk about and review. Think of good questions to ask for this Saturday. As I did last night I will be on for 4 hours BUT if the questions keep rolling in and I am not tied I will go as along as there is steam.

 

Also save the date for the evening of Nov 22. I will be doing a final webcast for the 2010 Black Friday season. We will review the ads, talk about what you should do now and answer all of your questions.

 

I have really enjoyed the webcasts and I hope everyone gets as much out of it as we at Gottadeal put into it. Thanks for watching!

[Yakyma]

I enjoyed the webcast last night, I had to miss the test one due to previous engagement. Like the others we should pretty much have all the ads and lots to talk about...lol. Thanks so much to all the mods and bigjim for all your help and taking your time to do this.

[Gator Pam]

Hey bigjim, it looks like The New York Times backed up the claim you made last night during the webcast regarding gobblegobble.com.

 

The Holiday Turkey Steps Out for a Smoke

By JOHN T. EDGE

 

Tyler, Tex.

 

LAST week, Teresa Braziel bought her “first Greenberg of the season,” a nine-pound turkey, nestled in a white cardboard box, printed with the slogan “The Holiday Aristocrat.”

 

Like many residents of this 100,000-person city in the piney woods of Texas near the Louisiana line, she claimed her spice-rubbed and hickory-burnished bird from the front counter at the Greenberg Smoked Turkey headquarters, a squat complex of interconnected cinder block and sheet metal buildings, shrouded in a seemingly perpetual shawl of gray-green smoke.

 

“This is my nibbling turkey,” Ms. Braziel said. “We’ll eat on this one — turkey and mustard with crackers, turkey salad, turkey chili — while we get ready for the parties.” In the coming weeks, she will buy three more, for a holiday open house, for Thanksgiving and for Christmas. And she will ship 20 more to friends in Dallas, Houston and beyond.

 

Greenberg Smoked Turkey, founded in 1938 by Samuel Isaac Greenberg and now run by his grandson Sam Greenberg, will sell about 20,000 turkeys to walk-in customers this season, priced at a little more than $4 a pound. Beginning on Monday of Thanksgiving week, a line will snake down the street and into the working-class neighborhood that surrounds the plant. To alleviate parking squabbles, Greenberg employees will shuttle customers about in golf carts.

 

For an independent producer that has built a reputation on pit-cooked poultry and personalized service, that may seem like a lot of turkeys to smoke and a lot of logistics to manage. But local sales are just the tip of the wing.

 

By the time Sam Greenberg closes for the holiday season on Dec. 24 and hands each of his 200 employees a free bird, more than 200,000 turkeys will have emerged from the company’s 20 brick-lined, hardwood-fired pit houses. Packed frozen, they thaw in transit and land two to three days later on doorsteps across the nation.

 

From New York to California, customers — some of whom claim three and four generations of patronage — will build family meals around Greenberg turkeys that, thanks to a daylong swirl in smoke, deliver the succulence that eludes most holiday cooks.

 

Samuel Isaac Greenberg was 17 in 1903 when he came to the United States as a Jewish immigrant from Poland. Disembarking in Galveston, Tex., he made his way north to Tyler at the invitation of the congregation Ahavath Achim. According to Hollace Ava Weiner, an author of the book “Lone Stars of David: The Jews of Texas,” he was recruited to serve as a religious leader.

 

As the hazan, he led prayers and chanted from the Torah, Ms. Weiner said. As the mohel, he circumcised male babies. And as the shochet, he butchered animals, including geese and turkeys, following Jewish rituals.

 

By the 1930s, when Tyler boasted more than one shochet, Samuel Greenberg was selling smoked kosher turkeys to Jews and non-Jews alike.

 

He rubbed those birds with a spice mix attributed to his mother, Jennie Greenberg. Working in a metal shebang with a sand-covered floor, tucked in a back corner of his milking barn, Greenberg and Elva Cole, a black colleague who probably stoked the pits, hung the turkeys from a nested pair of ceiling-mounted wagon wheels and smoked them over hickory logs.

 

Few records of the early days of the business remain. But every Greenberg tells the story of the six turkeys ordered in 1938 by a Dallas customer. Purchases were traditionally picked up on the farm, so they had to figure out how to get the turkeys to Dallas, about 100 miles west. Zelick Greenberg, a son of Samuel, packed the turkeys in a candy store box, added straw for cushioning, and shipped them by rail from Tyler.

 

Word of Samuel and Zelick Greenberg’s work spread by mouth. And by rail. And soon by mail. The birds that arrived on the other end were not typical smoked turkeys. “What my father did was not a casual smoke,” said Sam Greenberg, a ruddy-faced 52-year-old, who may never have met a stranger.

 

“Those turkeys weren’t honey-colored, they were really, truly smoked,” Mr. Greenberg said, his voice rising to a shout, as if an increase in volume could convey the intensity of the charred hickory fog that permeates his family’s turkeys, rendering the birds a color best described as burnt umber with a black licorice wash.

 

“There is no magic here, just hard work,” Mr. Greenberg said, as he stepped down into the rectangular shed where Tony Wallace, a 27-year veteran of the company, loaded hickory logs in one of the three rolling fire boxes that fuel each of the 20 pit houses. (A typical East Texas barbecue man must stoop to fire a pit with a long-handled shovel. Here, pit masters like Mr. Wallace push webbed iron conveyances, loaded with smoldering coals, back and forth on an ingenious track-mounted system devised in the 1950s by Zelick Greenberg.)

 

Like many East Texas pit masters, Mr. Wallace is black. And like many who work at Greenberg, he is a seasonal employee. During the nine months when the pits are not in regular use, he does carpentry work. Ray Wallace, his brother, an eight-year veteran, drives a dump truck in the off-season.

 

In Tyler, jobs with Greenberg are hard won. Despite the fractured nature of employment, the company boasts two staff members who began working at the plant before Sam Greenberg was born. The Greenberg approach runs contrary to the heritage poultry movement of the last decade. “I buy the same birds you would buy in a grocery store,” Mr. Greenberg said. As a smile creased his face, he claimed never to have heard of heritage turkeys, the much-fetishized breeds rescued from the agricultural past, that live cage free and promise, when roasted, a more robust flavor than a typical grocery store bird.

 

“You don’t want a scrawny, long-legged bird on your Thanksgiving table,” said Mr. Greenberg, seated in his office behind a one-way mirror that faces a call center bullpen where, at the peak of the season, 40 or more operators swivel beneath bright fluorescent lights and peck turkey orders into terminals. “You want conformity in your bird. And that means a turkey with a big breast and short legs.”

 

To achieve that conformity, Greenberg sources broad-breasted white turkeys, the commodity market standard, from Norbest, a Utah cooperative. “They come out good on the other end,” Mr. Greenberg said, implying, as barbecue pit masters do hereabouts, that excellence in smoked-meat cookery is determined by human resources, not natural resources.

 

Sam Greenberg has made a number of adjustments through the years. Unlike his father and grandfather before him, he no longer smokes kosher turkeys. In 1981, he stopped handwriting gift cards. Last year, Greenberg started accepting credit cards via its Web site, gobblegobble.com. (Previously turkeys were shipped, and invoices were paid on the honor system.)

 

He prefers, however, to focus consumer attention on his company’s hidebound ways. With the cadence of a salesman, he trumpets an aversion to change that would give pause to the most conservative Texas legislator.

 

On plant tours, visitors learn that Greenberg employees still hand-trim every bird, cutting the wing tips and neck flap from the carcass. And they knife-jab each turkey at least six times, so that the spice mix, which is robust with ground black pepper, can permeate the flesh. They hand-truss each pair of turkey legs, too, before hanging the dressed bird in its pit house berth.

 

“I want to be known as the guy who didn’t mess up Greenberg Smoked Turkey,” Mr. Greenberg said, leaning from the window of a swooping black Mercedes with license plates that read “GIBLET.”

 

“If I mess things up, I’ll be messing with people’s holiday tradition, and I’m not inclined to do that.”

[bigjimslade]

Bump for the day! Dont forget our webcast this Saturday!