surviving black friday

this past friday is known as black friday and for americans all over the country, that means shopping. as for my black friday story... well that begins on thursday, otherwise known as thanksgiving.

thanksgiving was typical of any other american thanksgiving, with turkey and all the usual fixings, prepared by my multi-talented girlfriend. and like any normal thanksgiving dinner, i was about ready to go to sleep around halfway through the meal. after dinner was risk, the global domination game, and then some other games until 2am rolled around. 2am was significant for two reasons, one: it was officially black friday and two: allowing for travel time, leaving at around 2am would have us arrive in time to catch the opening of several stores at 4am. unfortunately for me, none of this pre-black friday celebration/preparation included any sort of sleep.

the seventy mile drive to cabazon took just over an hour and was fairly uneventful. for those of you unfamiliar with cabazon, it's a town just off of I-10 in southern california that houses a number of factory outlet stores. as we drove up to the mall, i noticed a long line of cars outside the mall entrance waiting for security to open the gates. i was planning on getting in one of these lines when we noticed that the entryway to the rear parking lot had just opened. after parking in the rear, we started walking around trying to get into the mall. through the glass entryway we could see a girl inside, sitting on a bench. given the fact that we walked around the entire mall and found no ambulatory entrances, i believe that some people had the gusto to actually spend the night in the mall.

at 3:20 or 3:30ish, security had opened up the doors and lines had already formed at several key stores. while lines did exist, they were very amorphous. by simply ignoring the line and waiting near the front doors we were able to get in with the first batch of shoppers. our party split up into two factions: one that went into the coach store, and one that went into armani exchange. one interesting thing was the fact that virtually every early bird shopper was of asian descent. in fact, i heard chinese being spoken more often than not while waiting to get into A|X. i guess us asians really like our deals.

of course, the combination of the early hour and anticipation of shopping had more than a few people on edge. there was some yelling and pushing with regards to line jumping, and even two guys on the verge of getting into a fight after being pushed into A|X by the crowd. the rest of the day was spent waiting in seemingly unmoving lines: lines to get into stores and lines to pay. there was even one line (to get into coach) that went out and around several pillars and kiosks and then wrapped back onto itself, thus creating the rarely seen 'line that feeds into itself and goes nowhere'.

other than the massive amounts of people, the rest of the day was rather un-noteworthy. interestingly enough, by the time we left the mall (9 or 10am) only two stores still had a line to get in: armani exchange and coach--both much longer than at 4am.