Shopping on Black Friday?!

(The past few days have been hectic in the Figueroa household. Eli's sleeping pattern and habits have changed since she turned 6 months old and we are still working on figuring them out. Bear with me as I try to update the blog whenever I have a chance. Thanks)

I had done Black Friday shopping once before in Puerto Rico with my good friend and comadre Maura.  I swore I would never do it again until this year.  The friends with whom we spent Thanksgiving decided they wanted to do some Black Friday Shopping (something they had never done before) at some outlet mall near their house. After giving it much thought, I decided to go. It couldn't hurt, right?

This year the sales started early, very early. The outlet would be opening at 10:00 pm on THANKSGIVING DAY!! Yes, you read correctly on Thursday, not Friday. Wonder why the sale does not changes name now to Black Thursday or something along those lines as I kept reading in the news about earlier opening times. So we headed to the mall a little after 10. The ride over there was smooth without too much traffic. So we thought that maybe there was not a lot of people out. (But we passed a Toys R Us/Babies R Us store which was packed and had long lines). How wrong were we when we got to the mall - there were people already leaving with their hands full of bags from different stores! We even saw one guy carry 6-7 bags just from the Tommy Hilfiger outlet. It was not even 11:00 pm! We thought we were late and all the good sales were over. However, we did score some great deals even after my friends had to stand in line outside the Coach outlet in the cold.

Here are some of the deals we found: Coach had everything on sale plus an additional 30% of your purchase, Van Heusen had great sales as well including triple savings, Polo Ralph Lauren had 30% off throughout the store, Brooks Brothers had button up shirts for $30 (sale price for these shirts is buy 3 for $190 ish), Carter's had 50% off throughout the store plus door busters like $5 fleece sweaters that retail for $22 a piece.  All of us got the gifts we needed at awesome prices! The best part was seeing the amount saved on each other's receipts. In the end, everything went smooth without any violent incident or an insane amount of people, which made me glad to have made the decision to go.

However, I saw on the news all the violent incidents during Black Friday throughout the States and even in Puerto Rico. I don't see the need to take out your pepper spray to fight over a video game console or to fight with people over electronics when you are only saving maybe $90. I even saw on the news how there were people waiting for shoppers to come out of the stores to rob them at gun point on the parking lots. Do we have to reach these extremes? What about respect to human life? In the end, is it worth it going through all that trouble?