And so it was this morning at 4:15am Friday in San Jose, where we're staying for Thanksgiving with Delia's parents. Max whimpers, Delia wakes up and feeds him, puts him back down, the whimpering stops, I try (usually unsuccessfully) to go back to sleep, and....Hey, this is the day after Thanksgiving!
Delia spent a lot of yesterday looking online for sales, and Wal-Mart had a big one that started 5am. In fact, Wal-Mart had an e-machines laptop for $200. That's $100 cheaper than what I could find online. The online Wal-Mart ad showed a map where you could get the laptop along with the other 9 featured items. The laptop was in the back of lawn and garden. Huh?? Maybe they wanted me to buy gardenias afterwards. Whatever...Delia told me last night there was a Wal-Mart on Monterey Road about 10 minutes from here. She told me there'd be a big line, but I figured it would clear out after 15 minutes or so. Besides, what else exactly am I supposed to do at 4:45 am in South San Jose? This is exciting. Into the Civic I go.
This has nothing to do with Wal-Mart. Max's hair just hasn't grown out so, out of concern, I've started the Max Hair Watch. I am monitoring his hair progress by pushing it together, mohawk-style, and taking a photo.I didn't know where Wal-Mart was, but I'm stopped at a light in a dark road somewhere in the mist. Coming the other way was a huge line of car lights. Lots of them were making left turns, lots were making U-turns, and...okay, Wal-Mart must be somewhere around here. So I make a turn and I'm in a big line of cars going somewhere. I'm in no mood to fight for a parking spot - I really don't care enough. So I park in an empty lot outside a pho noodle house.
Apparently I'm a trendsetter. Within literally a minute of parking, there were 50 cars surrounding mine. In a way, that's good news - it means I didn't park a couple miles from Wal-Mart.
And, after a 5-minute hurried walk jockeying for position with the other walkers, I see the store. It's about 5:00 am, the time the store opened.
OK, Delia was right. There was a line. It started inside the store, and went through a bunch of the kind of snaking S-turn things you see in the airport. Those were there just for show, though, because the line then shot out to one end of the store, to the back of the parking lot, around half of the lot, back to the store, to lawn and garden, around the edge of the lot and finally to the Lucky's in the next parking lot. I measured the distance for about 10 people, multiplied that distance by 10 to get a measurement for 100 people, and then...I wouldn't be surprised if the line had 2,000 people in it. More calculations: There were 10 featured items. So there had to be around 200 of each item if I was to get one. Ten items, 200 of each item, $100 savings on them...Wal-Mart would be losing $200,000 in about 30 minutes on each store. Yikes. Could Wal-Mart recoup that with another few hours of selling low-margin stuff? Well, that wasn't out of the question. The line was orderly and was actually moving pretty quickly and I made it from the Lucky's to the outside of lawn and garden. A rumor shot through the line that they were going to open the store at lawn and garden. Then, a security guard walked to lawn and garden. As he walked around the corner, a bunch of people broke away from the line to tail him like mosquitos. Nope, the rumor was false. But I could see inside lawn and garden and saw....another huge line. That's why they spread the sales items around. I'm probably not gonna get this computer.
I couldn't leave, though...I had enough curiosity to wonder what was in this store. So after a more or less uneventful 30 minutes (punctuated only by a Mercedes driving through the line from what was probably a very good spot...interesting. This person buys a Mercedes but is willing to go to Wal-Mart probably at 1:00 am to save a couple hundred dollars...) I'm in.
As the reader can probably imagine, the inside of the store was a mess. Predictably, I went to lawn and garden and the laptop was gone...but there were other ones on sale somewhere else. I went somewhere else and found tons of lines in all kinds of directions. I had no idea what people were in the lines for. I started asking. One person said it was for a camera. Someone else wanted a TV. Apparently the people in the lines didn't know what they were getting either. The store had an air of desperation and disillusionment. Would this be how Wal-Mart would look like after World War III? Wal-Mart employees were scarce, and the crowds were getting to me. I found refuge in the clothes hanger aisle...actually, I could use some clothes hangers. You know, I really want hangers.
I took my prize - a set of 10 hangers. I went to pay for it, but, of course, the lines at the front were miserable also. I left, wanted a souvenir and asked if I could have one of a stack of crowd control manuals at the front of the store. (Nope.) And so ended at 5:51 am, empty-handed, my Black Friday shopping day.
