Penned and Pinned

Thanksgiving sale, thats right, something that I used to be crazy about. Being a student and our first rule of thumb on finance is 'a penny saved is a penny earned' (still its the same though). I have bought many stuff for free (yes, thats right, almost absolutely free except for the postage on mail-in rebates) and collected 'treasures' (my room mates used to be sarcastic with me since some of them I hardly used, but hey, its free anyway remember).

The place I used to live didn't have any stores other than Walmart, Kroger and few other small shopping places, after all, it was a university town anyway. We used to plan few days before and get our traveling plans worked out (X commutes with Y, and A commutes with B, C and D etc -- since many of us will be going to our back home countries in december, many of us even rent the car and do the shopping for the loved ones back home).

Second thing on our list is to get a list of things to buy, spend hours around on the net and searching for deals and finalize the list with optimal price. And we share the shopping places, like X goes to OfficeMax, Y goes to Office Depot, Z goes to BestBuy etc buy 4 items of that, 7 items of this etc.

We get up early in the morning (i mean literally, we get up around 3:00 am, by the way, most of our room mates including me do not have the habit of getting up before 10am on the weekends) and drive for about an hour to the shopping places. Generally we reach around 5 am and we stand in the line in the freezing cold (as you see in the picture). Actually, in some places, people come to shops the day before evening and wait until the next day for early bird deals (you can even  get laptops for $200 once a year, if you are desperate, you wouldn't mind doing). We stay outside the shops for about an hour in the freezing whether to shop around.

Generally our credit cards will be used left and right and will be bleeding at the end of the day. Finally, we sense the fake joy of winning the friday sales and be proud and will be bragging around with our colleagues for couple of days.

This is my past semi-decade year of thanksgiving, and the place that I moved to recently have all the shops, you name it, its here. But, I lost the interest in that crazy shopping ( may be my friends are not here with me or I'm not a student anymore :) ).

I found out that it was a joyous moment to shop around with the friends that was one of the main motivation behind the continuous semi-decade blackfriday shopping march on a freezing weather and I lack that here.

By the way, I still bought few things in the later day though. And I read that this year there is a 7.2% increase in the average spending on thanksgiving day (see here) - hey after all, country in a recession and its understandable that people are making use of the deals.