I’m beginning to understand why people have things delivered. Today I drove DF to work so that I could use the vehicle for the day. I figured I’d do a couple of errands and maybe meet a friend for lunch.
Somehow the errands took over, shaving off slabs of time like a knife on a shawarma spit. It felt as though I spent two hours just getting out of the car and into the stores.
I’d forgotten how much I hate shopping. Real shopping, that is, not the kind I did in Seattle.
You don’t have to use them on Black Friday, of course. Use them on Post-Turkey Thursday or Cyber Monday. Or just hoard them until you see something you want to buy.
Planning to shop online between Black Friday – which is increasingly more of a Post-Turkey Thursday – and Cyber Monday? A company called STELLAService has determined that the merchants with the shortest phone-support hold times are Nordstrom.com (18 seconds), Overstock.com (44 seconds), LLBean.com (46 seconds), Zappos.com (1 minute, 9 seconds) and Target.com (1 minute, 18 seconds).
That information is based on the 2011 shopping season. I bet it’ll be just as good this year, since retailers are scrambling to stand out among the din of the busiest shopping weekend of the year.
And if you’re buying from a place that leaves you languishing on hold for lonnnnng minutes? Here are six things to do while you wait:
This week’s drawing is for the kind of prize most favored by readers. Chocolate runs a very close second – but allow me to point out that you can buy chocolate on Amazon.com.
I’ve got four issues of coupon-heavy All You magazine to give away, along with several other items in the “shopping” family.
An easy way to reduce your carbon footprint is to bring your own shopping bags. Let me make it easier still.
Here’s what the winner will receive:
If I were you, I’d let him.
Here’s my feeling about presents: Once they’re yours, you get to use them any way you like. If you want to regift it, donate it to charity, sell it in a yard sale or run over it with a steamroller, that’s your business.
Which is why I sold two of the gift cards I got during the holidays. They morphed from $75 worth of might-not-get-used promissory plastic into $63.79 worth of Amazon.com gift cards.
Some would look at this as an $11.21 loss. Not me. I look at it as being that much closer to the crib I need to buy.
No, I am not kidding. Picture a 43-foot-tall artificial tree draped with more than $11 million worth of jewelry and precious stones.
If you want to get a closer look, you’ll have to travel to the Emirates Palace Hotel in Abu Dhabi. But not too close a look — the tree has four guards.
My unconventionally coiffed friend J. Money is nothing if not a realist. He figured that “about a bazillion” Black Friday posts would go up in the PF blogosphere right before the big day.
So he decided to make his own post about sex. Pretty much what you might expect from a guy whose site is called Budgets Are Sexy.
Of his “10 ways Black Friday is like sex,” my favorites were: