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I have been Black Friday shopping and have never found people to be vicious or wild. In fact, when I've done it, the mood was festive and the energy was fun. It probably helped that I was never there for the limited, hard to find, huge sale items that everybody wanted. The last time I did it, the big thing was the Pokemon Game Boy. I seem to remember everybody wanted the yellow one. Anyway, people filed into the store calmly back then.
Some stores have done a smart thing and go along the line an hour or two before opening asking people which item they are waiting for. They give out a voucher for that item so that these kinds of stampedes don't have to happen. Sort of like the wrist band concept for concert tickets. They would announce to the whole line when they were out of vouchers so those people could leave if they wanted to. I think it was Best Buy that was doing that. They did that for book signings and book releases too (the seventh Harry Potter for one) to avoid those kinds of problems. There ARE ways around it.
I fully intended to be out there today. However, since it looks like, when it's all finished, I will have paid $2700 in car repairs/rental over the past week/next week, I've told the kids that there may not be a Christmas this year. I've spent my emergency fund, my Christmas fund and will have loaded a credit card to it's limit on a rental car so I can work and I'm basically screwed. I could go further into debt to provide a Christmas like they are used to, but I won't. I was in tears on Wednesday when I found out that the initial $500 repair wasn't enough and I was looking at another $1500. My 12 year old son came to me shortly after my talk with the kids and said "We are still going to have a Christmas, Momma. Other people buy us plenty of stuff and we'll still see our relatives and that's what is really important." A wise young man there. About 20 minutes after that, my daughter came to me and said "Can you buy me this $15 t-shirt as an early Christmas present? There are only 50 more available and I really want it." My son and I looked at her and I said "What part of that earlier conversation did you miss?" Two kids raised by the same two parents under the same lifelong financial conditions and they have such different attitudes. Is this an inborn thing? That girl is a financial bottomless pit, always wanting more, with an Amazon wish list of 94 items (mostly books and CDs) and then there's my son who didn't give me enough ideas to be able to pass them on to all the different relatives. I've done everything I can think of to try to instill some money values into this girl and nothing has worked. My son though? He wanted a capture card so he can record things from the TV or Xbox to the computer so he could edit movies to post on YouTube. He came to me with a plan of extra work he would do around the house for two months to earn the capture card. I rewarded his plan with the capture card and have held him to the agreement. I really don't know why they are so different.
All that said, I don't see anything wrong with taking of advantage of sales for things that you were planning on buying anyway. If I was in the market for an HDTV and had saved $1000 for it to find that the one I had saved for was on sale for $700, I would attempt to get it and save that $300. The error is when people decide they need it because it's on sale rather than already having a plan to buy it and deciding to buy it when it's on sale.
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