At the BB in Pentagon City -Arlington VA, I was not given the Black Friday price adjustment on the WD 60G HD. The manager refused to let me return it and buy it back at the Friday price either. The manager said that all he was allowed to do is sell 20 HDs that day and no more, so I ended up getting a refund. It's amazing that no one BB store has the same interpretation of their own pricing policies.

I think the problem is that they will price match, except for "special" sales. Now what determines whether or not a sale is special? Well, that's up to the individual store. I was able to convince the manager to PM everything but the "5 hour sale items".

My journey began at 4:30am. I drove about 30 minutes to Mervyn's to pick up a Frosty Bobblehead. I waited in my car because it was freezing but got in line at 6:15 when it started to get crowded. The line stretched all the way back around a Toys'r Us that was at the end of the mall. I grabbed my bobblehead and headed straight for Circuit City. The only thing I wanted was the Nike MP3 player and there were none on the shelves. The CSR said he had a few more in the back and I got the last one. There was only one other customer looking for it. After a short wait for their computer system to catch up to insane number of transactions going on at once, I headed over to Best Buy. The parking lot was full so I parked across the street in a theater parking lot. BB was a zoo. The line went back to the stereo area, looped around a few aisles, and went all the way over to the front of the computer department. I felt like I was waiting for a ride at Disneyland. My friend got there at 6am and he was able to get me a pack of Cdrs and he got one of the last harddrives. We waited in line for about 1.5 hours and watched as the BB employees tried to sell people on AV cables, surge protectors, and printer ink. Got out of there at 10am and crashed for the rest of the day.

I made a quick run to BB the next day for Dumbo and they had a ton of Dreamcasts leftover.

I had planned to get up at 4:50am to be at the Dallas-LBJ/Midway Best Buy early but the lure of my warm bed kept me from leaving until 6:00am. Luckily, this Best Buy is about 1.5 miles from my home so I was in line (about #100) by 6:10am. The line filled in quickly behind me as dawn broke over the crowd. The line wrapped around the building and the parking lot was full by 6:40am.

Yes, there were people waiting to rush the line and this Best Buy did a pretty good job of keeping people from joining at the very front. As the line started to move into the store, one clever lady came back towards my part of the line and cut in ahead of me. I told her she was fooling herself if she thought she could get away with it then she laughed at me. I pointed her out to the security people at the front and then laughed as they hauled her back out of line.

Once in the store, I was handed a FOX DVD but almost missed them as the crowd surged forward past the table. I think a lot of people had to go back to claim one. I made it back to the DVD section and found no signs of the sales display. A helpful employee guided me to "Shrek" and actually ran and got me a copy of "Episode 1" before he pointed out the displays. They were matte-black boxes below waist-level with no DVDs protruding from the top. One small sign on each indicated the price but that was it. "The Magnificent Seven" went quickly but all of the other discs were available in quantity for at least 45 minutes.

I then went to software and picked up a couple copies of "Sheep" for $3.99 as gifts. This is when I noticed that the FOX DVDs were lying all over the store as people saw the "$4.99" price sticker. I knew they were free but a lot of folks must have thought that the price was in effect and ditched it rather than spend $4.99+tax on some crappy disc they'd been handed at the door. I snagged one extra for my girlfriend and headed for the cashiers.

Checkout was pretty painless as the lines were moving well. I spent maybe 10 minutes waiting and was out of the store at 7:37am. I even got to use a $15 gift card that I'd been toting around for several months. I wish the deals had been better and I'm glad I wasn't trying for the hardware but I'll give Best Buy thumbs up for this year.

After this was a trip to K-Mart for $8.88 bookshelves which I only got because one woman had three she was putting back as I stood in the aisle. She didn't want to wait to do layaway and I was happy to help her unload them from her cart. Oh, and their CD-R deal was almost as sweet as Best Buy's only without having to wait 6 months for a rebate that might not arrive.

Nothing at BB was on my must-have list this year, so I headed to Circuit City for their "All CDs $9.99" sale. Picked up 5 discs, but CC was out of a handful of titles I wanted. Later around 5pm I went to Best Buy and arrived just in time to hear a lady ask if they would pricematch CC's CD sale. The manager says "Okay, but only up to 5 titles."

So I picked up 5 more cds, including the titles I had originally wanted at CC AND the live 2-disc Stevie Ray Vaughn set (sticker says $24.99!!) for $9.99 each. Not a huge haul, but I was very pleased.

Price matching rules!

My Black Friday started off bad, but ended the way I wanted (I got the stuff I wanted). I went to Best Buy at 5:30 am, I was about #50 in line. At about 6:45, 500+ people were in line. At 7:00am, they opened the door, everybody bumrushed it, and I went to check if they had and GameCube's in stock, turned out they didn't, so I packed up my bags and went to CC. An employee said that they had gamecube's in stock and just to wait in line, I thought that was pretty strange, but I went ahead and got in line. In 50 minutes, I moved about 6 feet, and there were at least 20 people ahead of me (new cashier that was very very slow...), and I asked a different employee that looked like she knew something. She said that they were sold out since monday, so I was about to go home. Toys R' Us is on the way home so I figured just to stop there and check if they had any. Turns out they had 4 of each color (I got indigo), and there were NO LINES at all. So I picked it up, went home, then just went to sleep.