getting up at 5 am to go wait in line at best buy for a bargain
 

sounds like a pearl jam song title. but...that's where i am headed right now. laptop for $399. weep for me. all of the local stores were out yesterday,but they said they would have 8 this morning. i assume( iknow, i know) they meant they'd get them overnight, and have them when they open. hope i'm not all pissed off when next we meet.

Good luck being one of the people who gets one of the three they have in stock.

Wishing you all the luck in the world - I do hoe you get it, but Target used to say they were getting stuff in all the time when they knew they weren't. 3 years ago they didn't have one, not one, digital camcorder in stock after Nov.15th and just kept telling people they'd be in the next week. I hate it when retailers do that.

I was at Target last night at 10:45PM, right before closing (don't ask), and they had pallets of stuff stacked in the aisles ready to be stocked. I'm sure it was a fun night for the employees.

Let me guess, LJ, $200 service plan to go with it?? :D

Slacker. If you really wanted this deal, you would have camped out overnight in a lawn chair.

Who's getting the surprise computer, then?

so, i got there(King of Prussia store) at 6:15, and sat in my car listening to my book, drinking coffee. ( no one elses there waiting, and yes, i felt like a dick) at about 7:15, i went and stood by the door. at 7:30 another schmuck like myself came and stood next to me.....after the same computer....( his wife had been there yesterday, and was told that they had them, but weren't selling them until today) this was encouraging to me. by the time 8:00 rolled around, there were maybe 10 people waiting to enter.

I was 1st, and went directly to the comuter section, grabbed a guy, and told him what i wanted. he looked on the shelf, diddled the computer, and then went and conferred with the guy in the yellow shirt. guess what? they sold out yesterday, and showed none incoming.

liars. i'm sure the fucking employees all bought them up. so , the guy says, they have 4 in Plymouth Meeting. So, i call, and the guy says they have 3. 1st come 1st serve. Plymouth Meeting should be about 10-15 minutes away if you hop on the turnpike. I got all fucked up leaving, and wound up taking 202 through Norristown, wending my way, trying to remember where the hell Ridge pike came in. So it took me more like 35 minutes.

When i got there, there was a cop car sitting out front, and visions of tramplings surfaced, then immediately faded......... nah. just a cop talking to the manager(yellow shirt) quietly near the entrance. SO, i scoot over to the computer section, and ask the guy if they have this Toshiba notebook. he says, "last one left" which i heard as 'left' being a verb. "Aw, shit. how long ago?" I said. just wanting to know how much i missed it by. " no, no there's one left. the last one." left being an adjective.

so, i bought it. and declined the service plan that would cost >%50 of the price for a 3 yr guarantee. but, the good news is that i can change my mind, and buy it if i become retarded in the next 14 days. so, i 've got that going for me.

Then i got jinx's present after 3 different stops. fucking stores with their lazy, ignant, crapeater employees, and lack of inventory of advertised items.

puter's for the kids schoolwork, spode.

He was hoping it was for jinx, so she'd have a dedicated machine to further her photographic endeavors.

Ha! Nicely done LJ.

thanks, this may have been the difference.

The goal of limited inventory of fire sale priced items is not to provide good deals to the shopping public. The goal is to get you into the store whereupon you find that the item you wanted is gone, but now you're desperate and so you have to buy something else.

yaeh, who don't know that. i had resolved to go to circuit city if they didnt have it. as it was, i bought a couple other things while i was there. they still suck.

I find it amusing that BB has to know that "they still suck" is the primary emotion they are generating in their customers, but that it is okay with them since, like LJ, they seem to still spend more money anyway.

So much for traditional "make the customer feel good" methods of marketing.

yeah, I should refuse to shop there, and Walmart, but..... to save $230 i'm a complete whore, I admit it.


I should have just bought thier loss leader and split. but, i am weak.

Not a bully in my book, for reasons that most resemble Beestie's. Once again, he says what I am thinking.

FWIW I got bullied a lot in elementary/middle school for being a tomboy and having lots of freckles, so I have extensive experience.

I did the same thing, only I managed to find what I was looking for without being out front before the butt crack of dawn.

We're all whores when it comes to money.

:eyebrow: Talk about a mindf*ck...Here I am, reading about loss leaders, laptops, and Walmart, nodding my head in agreement and suddenly there is a post that sure sounds like it is a response to some other thread about bullies...


<<<wonders if she's losing the few marbles she has left.

Well, since we've turned to bullying:P I also have extensive experience of bullying and in that experience, by far the worst aspect, was not being bullied by a single individual, but the way it spread to pretty much the whole class. That's the trouble with bullying, to me, it's rarely just one person picking on one other person: it's usually a bloody big group of people picking on one person. Mob mentality.

I was given the mob mentality for a year at age 12-13 and only escaped it by the fate of moving out of the country.

Not to mention, when you die, on your deathbed, you will receive total consciousness.

;)

Good score. I got the last generator in washingotn county last winter when the power was out for two days under similar circumstances/ m.o.

*nods* I had it for quite a long time. Usually in stints of 6mths or a year at a time, pretty much throughout my school days. One year was particularly bad and I spent that year hiding in the library at lunch and break times. Other years weren't as bad. The stints of really bad ezcema (bandaged up and unable to move properly), strange dietary requirements and an accent which didn't match my peers didn't do much towards a happy school life :P

Things got distinctly better in 4th and 5th year (14-15/16).

To this day I maintain that girls are waaaay worse than boys on that score.

Been there, done that, it sucks. I just got the eczema on my hands, though, but it was awful when little and you were supposed to walk in a crocodile in pairs holding hands and no-one would. Learned to pick up accents pretty quick, though, which has sort of served me well over here (I can say Water and be understood ....sometimes ;))

*chuckles* the accent thing was a funny one. I am actually good at accents, I have a good ear for cadences. But.....my first primary school was a little rough and I started out well spoken...got picked on for speaking 'posh' and changed my accent to be more like theirs....then i moved to a new primary school which was a little more well to do, and got teased for speaking rough....so i changed back to my original accent (or rather lack of accent). Then i went to secondary school and found myself again being teased for speaking 'posh':P I then gave up changing my accent to fit in.

But to get back on topic: What mad things have other people queued/quested for?

same here...... coming from a military family who travelled world-wide, I had no distinct regional accent (is there such a thing as a 'Service' accent?) and was always accused of being 'posh'. Just because I could swear profanely in latin.....

as for queing........ sorry, don't do queues...... have already been banned from several local supermarkets for walking off and leaving full trolleys in the overlong till queues.

hahaha. You sound lik my ex.:P

Good on them.

:rant: If supermarkets are short staffed how on earth are you improving ther situation by making more work (not to mention the wastage - chilled and frozen food in the trolley will have to be destroyed). If all the tills are working but there are still queues it's your own silly fault for shopping when it's busy.

I'm with Jay--I have no sympathy for places that let huge lines develop at their checkouts. As a business you have to convince people to come into a store and buy your stuff. Once I've decided I'm going to fork over my hard-earned cash to you, I shouldn't have to wait for the privilege.

(Though I've never left a cart behind--annoying as it is, that would just be a double waste of my time in having to go shop somewhere else.)

I'm just finding the idea of Jay, bedecked in his cardigan glory, just stopping where he is for a moment and then walking off without the trolley, somewhat amusing.

it's a cool move in theory, but in practice, as SG says, rather lame. and at the risk of sounding cynial, i am skeptical of the accuracy of his claim.

You know what freaks me out? WalMart and Target stores have, like, thirty checkout lines, but I have never seen more than seven or eight running at any one time, and that includes Xmas Eve and other megabusy time periods.

I used to think it was quite a hoot when WalMart had signs over their checkouts that read, "WalMart - Where You're Always Next in Line!" I took that to mean that you would *never* get to the damn cashier.

Crazy thing happened at the checkout line of the grocery store just today. Most of the lines were open and busy, but the line next to me happened to be closed. This old woman shuffled up with her cart, looking distracted but not senile or anything, and after seeing how long my line was chose instead to go to the register next to me. She seemed completely oblivious to the fact that no one was running it, and began loading her groceries onto the conveyor belt. After giving her ample time to just let her realize her mistake on her own, I finally went over and pointed out that no one was working that register. She shrugged and said, "Honey, if I just wait here long enough they'll send someone over eventually." And she meant it. She sat there, paging through magazines, and was still waiting when I left.

As I sat at the wrong register 4 people deep tonight, I pondered what it would take for me to abandon my cart. The math was all wrong.

10 minutes to wait.

Versus 10 minutes to drive to the next market. 45 more minutes to fill another cart. 5 minutes to check out.

yeah, jay's full of shit....in my opinion.

Right, you gotta get some satisfaction at least, like overturning the whole cart full of groceries right there in the middle of the floor, wait for a manager to show up and then spit in his face, walk to your car and casually drive off, as a gaggle of angry employees charge into a delayed reaction, racing into the parking lot, beating on your windows and vociferously demanding something unspecified, as you skip to the chillest track on your favorite Steely Dan CD and fire up a big fat joint. What is this town coming to?

I think the correct way to go would have been to just wheel the cart out of the store if the queue was that long. I'm sure they'd have been pretty quick to serve at that point. :)

Sounds like a scene out of a movie. Were you a screenwriter in the 80's, Flint? ;)

" . . . starring Christopher Walken . . "

what's with the ten minute wait at the checkout? I've waited way longer than ten minutes before now when the store's full.

Screw the math, if they piss me off, I'll even leave it on the belt. There is no price for abuse. :headshake
But 9 times out of 10, it's the shoppers rather than the store, screwing up.