a lighter shade of black friday

The day after Thanksgiving, also known as "Black Friday", is the shopping heyday for consumers in the United States to pick up so called incredible deals from retailers. Every years hundreds of thousands of consumers compete for parking spaces and the latest limited quantity fads, sometimes resulting in black eyes and lawsuits. I find it rather ridiculous, and haven't stepped foot in a shopping center on "Black Friday" for a very long time. In fact, I haven't been in a mall in a long time, and I certainly don't miss it.

Some of my relatives think that we're crazy, and often praise Black Friday as a great way to get a head start on your Christmas shopping with some extremely low prices. I honestly wouldn't mind the low prices. I just don't like to go shopping with a million other people. I've always wondered - why not just buy the same deals online? Why fight the crowds? Simply because it is a holiday shopping tradition?

I'm also not even sure that "Black Friday" really offers the best prices of the year for holiday shopping, and sometimes I think that retailers take advantage of people who are "in the mood" for spending money by placing sale tags on their everyday discounts. So how do you find out for sure whether you're getting the best deal?

Well, for one thing, you could do some online research ahead of time to compare prices. Of course, the problem behind this theory is that much of the shopping on Black Fridays is impulse shopping. What isn't impulse shopping are the shoppers who see the Black Friday ads and seek out those deals before they run out of stock.

One thing that surprised me is that there are websites that can show what the deals are going to be on Black Friday ahead of time, for certain retailers. So instead of waiting until the week before Thanksgiving to peruse the bfads, you can check them out ahead of time and see how much money you are really saving. For example, if I was planning on hitting Circuit City for their Black Friday sale, but I wanted t make sure that I was going to be getting the best deal (as opposed to getting wrapped up in the whole "Black Friday" spending craze), I might stroll over to a site like Black-Friday.net and see what deals Circuit City is going to be offering for their Black Friday sale. Even though Thanksgiving is a few months away, they've somehow got the deals listed already. I'm not sure how they know what the retailers are going to list, but it gives you a chance to see what is coming, and keep your eyes peeled for better deals between now and then.